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CHIUNE SUGIHARA/ 2009
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Prints on paper: Portraits 2 | | Medium: | Giclée on Japanese matte paper | | Size (inches): | 16.5 x 11.7 (paper size) | | Size (mm): | 420 x 297 (paper size) | | Edition size: | 25 | | Catalog #: | PP_0145 | | Description: | From an edition of 25. Signed, titled, date, copyright, edition in pencil on the reverse / Aside from the numbered edition of 5 artist's proofs and 2 printer's proofs.
"I may have disobeyed my government, but if I hadn’t I would have been disobeying God" - Chiune Sugihara
-www1.yadvashem.org/education/lessonplan/english/Sugihara/Sugihara.htm
Chiune Sugihara -
Chiune Sugihara (杉原 千畝, Sugihara Chiune, 1 January 1900 – 31 July 1986) was a Japanese diplomat, serving as Vice Consul for the Japanese Empire in Lithuania. Soon after the occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union, he helped several thousand Jews leave the country by issuing transit visas to Jewish refugees so that they could travel to Japan. Most of the Jews who escaped were refugees from Poland or residents of Lithuania. Sugihara wrote travel visas that facilitated the escape of more than 6,000 Jewish refugees to Japanese territory, risking his career and his family's life. In 1985, Israel honored him as Righteous Among the Nations for his actions.
Lithuania:
In 1939, he became a vice-consul of the Japanese Consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania. His other duty was to report on Soviet and German troop movements.
Sugihara is said to have cooperated with Polish intelligence, as a part of bigger Japanese-Polish cooperative plan.[2] Details remain sketchy, but after the Soviet takeover of Lithuania in 1940, many Jewish refugees from Poland (Polish Jews) as well as Lithuanian Jews tried to acquire exit visas. Without the visas, it was dangerous to travel and impossible to find countries willing to issue them. Hundreds of refugees came to the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, trying to get a visa to Japan. The Dutch consul Jan Zwartendijk had provided some of them with an official third destination to Curaçao, a Caribbean island and Dutch colony that required no entry visa, or Dutch Guiana (which, upon independence, became Suriname). At the time, the Japanese government required that visas be issued only to those who had gone through appropriate immigration procedures and had enough funds. Most of the refugees did not fulfill these criteria. Sugihara dutifully contacted the Japanese Foreign Ministry three times for instructions. Each time, the Ministry responded that anybody granted a visa should have a visa to a third destination to exit Japan, with no exceptions.
From July 31 to August 28, 1940, Sugihara began to grant visas on his own initiative, after consulting with his family. Many times he ignored the requirements and arranged the Jews with a ten-day visa to transit through Japan, in direct violation of his orders. Given his inferior post and the culture of the Japanese Foreign Service bureaucracy, this was an extraordinary act of disobedience. He spoke to Soviet officials who agreed to let the Jews travel through the country via the Trans-Siberian railway at five times the standard ticket price.
Sugihara continued to hand-write visas (reportedly spending 18–20 hours a day on them, producing a normal month's worth of visas each day) until September 4, when he had to leave his post before the consulate was closed. By that time he had granted thousands of visas to Jews, many whom were heads of household and thus permitted to take their families with them. According to witnesses, he was still writing visas while in transit from his hotel and after boarding the train, throwing visas into the crowd of desperate refugees out the train's window even as the train pulled out. Sugihara himself wondered about official reaction to the thousands of visas he issued. Many years later, he recalled, "No one ever said anything about it. I remember thinking that they probably didn't realize how many I actually issued."[3]
The total number of Jews saved by Sugihara is in dispute, ranging from 6,000 to 10,000; most likely, it was somewhere in the middle; family visas—which allowed several people to travel on one visa—were also issued, which would account for the much higher figure. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has estimated that Chiune Sugihara issued transit visas for about 6,000 Jews and that around 40,000 descendants of the Jewish refugees are alive today because of his actions.[4] Polish intelligence produced some false visas. Sugihara's widow and eldest son estimate that he saved 6,000 Jews from certain death, whereas Levine thinks it was far higher at around 10,000.[1] According to Hillel Levine's 1996 biography of Sugihara, In Search of Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat issued 3,400 transit visas to the Jews.[2] (Source: Booklist review) Levine reports from his research of official Japanese foreign ministry documents entitled "Miscellaneous Documents Regarding Ethnic Issues: Jewish Affairs,' vol.10, 1940 Diplomatic Record Office, Japanese Foreign Ministry, Tokyo", that he discovered one list alone of "2,139 names, largely of Poles--both Jews and non-Jews--who received visas between July 9 and August 31, 1940...It is far from complete; many who received visas from Sugihara, including children, are not on it. By statistical extrapolation, we can estimate that he helped as many as ten thousand escape; those who actually survived are probably no more than half that number."[5] Indeed, some Jews who received Sugihara visas failed to leave Lithuania in time, were later captured by the Germans who invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and perished in the Holocaust.
Levine discovered two documents from a Japanese foreign office file: the first aforementioned document is a February 5, 1941 diplomatic note from Chiune Sugihara to Japan's then Foreign Minister Yōsuke Matsuoka in which Sugihara stated he issued 1,500 out of 2,132 transit visas to Jews and Poles; however, since almost all the names of the 2,132 people were not Lithuanian at all, this would imply that most of the visas were given to Polish Jews instead.[6] Levine then notes that another document from the same foreign office file "indicates an additional 3,448 visas were issued in Kovno for a total of 5,580 visas" which were likely given to Jews desperate to flee Lithuania for safety in Japan or Japanese occupied China.[6] Moreover, there were also "some Jesuits in Vilna who were issuing Sugihara visas with seals that he had left behind and did not destroy, long after the Japanese diplomat had departed" which means that some Jews could have escaped Europe with forged visas issued under Sugihara's name.[7]
Many refugees used their visas to travel across the Soviet Union to Vladivostok and then by boat to Kobe, Japan, where there was a Russian Jewish community. Tadeusz Romer, the Polish ambassador in Tokyo, organised help for them. From August 1940 to November 1941, he had managed to get transit visas in Japan, asylum visas to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Burma, immigration certificates to the British Mandate of Palestine, and immigrant visas to the United States and some Latin American countries for more than two thousand Polish-Lithuanian Jewish refugees, who arrived into Kobe, Japan, and Shanghai Ghetto, China.[8]
The remaining number of Sugihara/Zwartendijk survivors stayed in Japan until they were deported to Japanese-held Shanghai, where there was already a large Jewish community. Others took a more southerly route through Korea directly to Shanghai without passing through Japan. A group of thirty "Jakub Goldberg" arrived one day to Tsuruga but were returned to Russian Nakhodka. Most of the around 20,000 Jews survived the Holocaust in the Shanghai ghetto until the Japanese surrender in 1945.
Despite German pressure for the Japanese government to either hand over or kill the Jewish refugees, the government protected the group. In The Fugu Plan (a book about the 1930s Fugu Plot), Rabbi Marvin Tokayer offered one hypothesis: it was in gratitude for a $196 million loan that a Jewish banker from New York, Jacob Schiff, had given to Japan; the funds helped them to victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. A broader hypothesis, which also motivated the 1930s scheme, involved the benefit of the supposed economic prowess to Jews (partly as some Japanese leaders had read anti-Semitic tracts attributing uncanny wealth and power to Jews), which was desirable to the Japanese empire. Finally, Jewish leaders pointed out that the Nazi ideal excluded "the yellow", and asserted that like the Japanese, the Jews were from Asia too.
Resignation:
Sugihara served as a Consulate General in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1941 in Königsberg and in legation in Bucharest, Romania. When Russian troops entered Romania, Soviet troops imprisoned Sugihara and his family in a POW camp for eighteen months. They were released in 1946 and returned to Japan through the Soviet Union via the Trans-Siberian railroad and Nakhodka port.
In 1947, the Japanese foreign office asked him to resign, nominally due to downsizing. Some sources, including his wife Yukiko Sugihara, have said that the Foreign Ministry told Sugihara he was dismissed because of "that incident" in Lithuania.
In October 1991, the ministry told Sugihara's family that Sugihara's resignation was part of the ministry's shakeup in personnel shortly after the end of the war. The Foreign Ministry issued a position paper on March 24, 2006, that there was no evidence the Ministry imposed disciplinary action on Sugihara. The ministry said that Sugihara was one of many diplomats to resign voluntarily, but that it was "difficult to confirm" the details of his individual resignation. The ministry praised Sugihara's conduct in the report, calling it a "courageous and humanitarian decision."
References:
1. ^ A Hidden Life: A Short Introduction to Chiune Sugihara
2. ^ Palasz-Rutkowska, Ewa. 1995 lecture at Asiatic Society of Japan, Tokyo; "Polish-Japanese Secret Cooperation During World War II: Sugihara Chiune and Polish Intelligence," The Asiatic Society of Japan Bulletin, March-April 1995.
3. ^ Sakamoto, Pamela. (1998). Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees, p. 123, citing Bill Craig. "A Beacon of Humanity in a Malevolent World," Pacific Sunday (June 23, 1985), pp. 11-14.
4. ^ a b c Sugihara statue dedicated in L.A.'s Little Tokyo, Asian Political News, December 16, 2002, Accessed January 24, 2009.
5. ^ Levine, Hillel. (1996). In Search of Sugihara: The Elusive Japanese Diplomat Who Risked His Life to Rescue 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust, p. 7.
6. ^ a b Levine, p. 285.
7. ^ Levine, p. 286.
8. ^ http://www.polish-jewish-heritage.org/Pol/maj_03_Romer_pomogal_Zydom.htm
Further reading:
* Gold, Alison Leslie (2000). A Special Fate: Chiune Sugihara: Hero Of The Holocaust. New York: Scholastic. ISBN 0-439-25968-1.
* Lee, Dom; Mochizuki, Ken (2003). Passage to Freedom: The Sugihara Story. New York: Lee & Low Books. ISBN 1-58430-157-0.
* Levine, Hillel (1996). In search of Sugihara: the elusive Japanese diplomat who risked his life to rescue 10, 000 Jews from the Holocaust. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0-684-83251-8.
* Sakamoto, Pamela Rotner (1998). Japanese diplomats and Jewish refugees: a World War II dilemma. New York: Praeger. ISBN 0-275-96199-0.
* Sugihara, Yukiko (1995). Visas for life. Edu-Comm Plus. ISBN 0-9649674-0-5.
* Swartz, Mary; Tokayer, Marvin (1979). The fugu plan: the untold story of the Japanese and the Jews during World War II. New York: Paddington Press. ISBN 0-448-23036-4.
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiune_Sugihara
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