Chiune Sugihara - Righteous Among Nations (Part One)

A Japanese Who Made a Difference for Israel

PART ONE

Image source: vilnews.com

Khen Lim

The story of Chiune Sugihara takes on three parts. This is a man who unassumingly did more than any other Asian to save the lives of thousands of Jews during World War Two and he did it despite not having the authority given to him by the Japanese Government whom he worked for as a diplomat in Europe.

This is Part One of his story. 




Forty-five years after the Soviet Union’s annexation of Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara was asked why he did what he did. Chiune said refugees, no matter who they were, were no less human than all of us. When they needed help, he simply did what he could.

“You want to know about my motivation, don’t you? Well, it is the kind of sentiment anyone would have when he actually sees refugees face to face, begging with tears in their eyes. I just cannot help but sympathise with them.

“Among the refugees were the elderly and women. They were so desperate that they went so far as to kiss my shoes. Yes, I actually witnessed such scenes with my own eyes. Also, I felt at that time, that the Japanese government did not have any uniform opinion in Tokyo. Some Japanese military leaders were just scared because of the pressure from the Nazis; while other officials in the Home Ministry were simply ambivalent.”

What is amazing about this story is that it isn’t about a heroic Jew or an American or a Briton who risked his life to do the right thing. In a world of right and wrong, the Second World War was distinct. On one side were the Allied forces and on the other is the Axis, more infamously known to be the combination of Germany, Italy and Japan, although some of us are aware that there were others also involved apart from these three.

The reputation of the Japanese army in the Second World War is unenviable for the atrocities they committed as they rampaged across Asia. For example following the Pearl Harbour bombing, innocent Japanese now living in America were herded to internment camps in remote areas as much to protect them as it were to put a between them and the American public. A war-mongering Japan of that period was hard to feel empathy towards, which then makes this particular story even more bewildering.

Here is a story of a great man from the wrong side of the war whose unprecedented actions had truly transfixed the entire world. One man did so this much with one pair of hands but it was his heart that was clearly a gift from God. It was a timely demonstration of the incredulous nature by which God sometimes works.

Early beginnings

Chiune Sugihara (written 杉原 千畝) is not well known in the public eye; not even today, despite the Internet. When it came to humanitarian boldness concerning saving Jews, being a Japanese was probably not a popular notion. Being on the wrong side of the war, someone with his name and position would have been considered a potential enemy but he was far from that.

Born in 1900, Sugihara-san lived till the ripe age of 86 years before he passed on an impressive legacy where his name would be forever imprinted in the hearts of all Israelis. He was the only Japanese ever to be honoured as “Righteous Among Nations”; a highly prestigious and exclusive award seldom given out in Israel.

Sugihara-san was duly recognised one year before he passed away and in some ways, his story is also a sad one because his own country had little understanding of his towering achievements until Israel revealed how he heroically helped in saving several thousand Jews to escape Nazi persecution.

Schooling Years

Image source: chiune-sugihara.jp

Raised in the rural prefecture of Gifu in the Chubu region to Yoshimi and Yatsu Sugihara, Chiune was the second of five boys and one girl. By the time he was 12 years old, he had finished Furuwatari Elementary School with top honours and enrolled himself in Daigo Chugaku (now known as Zuiryo High School) but his father’s aspirations to follow him as a physician were already made known. However Chiune had no inclination to do so and he deliberately failed his entrance exam by merely filling in his name and nothing else on the exam paper.

In 1918 he was offered a place at the prestigious Waseda University where he majored in English but he had also simultaneously joined the Yuai Gakusha, a Christian fellowship that was established by a Baptist pastor by the name of Harry Baxter Benninhof. College days for Chiune weren’t a breeze as he had to work at several part-time jobs just to make sure he had enough to pay for his tuition fees.

In the following year at the age of 19, Chiune spotted an opportunity he’d been dreaming about – to travel abroad and see the world – when the Foreign Ministry advertised that they were looking for students who were looking to study overseas while serving out a career in diplomacy. It was pretty much what he’d imagined wanting to do. And so he sat for and passed scrutiny for the Foreign Ministry Scholarship comprising not one but a series of difficult exams.

To his delight, he did well enough to be accepted into the Harbin Gakuin University in Manchuria where he could study both Russian and German, the latter of which he would be able to make good use of as a specialist in Russian affairs in his latter years. For now he had graduated with honours at the age of 24. 

Foreign Ministry

Flushed with academic success, Chiune looked for a career within the Manchurian government. For a Japanese, this was not a problem since the country had been under the control of Japan at that time. With 10 years of success as a career diplomat, Chiune had no difficulty qualifying for the position of Manchurian Minister of Foreign Affairs where he was part of the negotiations with the Soviet Union over the matter concerning the Northern Manchurian Railroad.

However he ended up not staying long at the post. Having found himself in strong disagreement over the way his fellow Japanese cruelly mistreated the local Chinese, he quit his post in protest. On his return to Harbin, Chiune became baptised, choosing his conversion to Orthodoxy Christianity. For his baptism, he chose a Russian name, calling himself ‘Pavlo Sergeivich Sugihara,’ and subsequently married a Russian by the name of Klaudia Semionova Apollonova.

Image source: rongreene.com

It wasn’t long, however, that the marriage ended up in divorce in 1935. Shortly thereafter he returned to Japan and married Yukiko Kikuchi and together, had four sons, Hiroki, Chiaki, Haruki and Nobuki.

In 1938 Chiune was appointed to a diplomatic post in Helsinki, Finland. At that time, Europe was deeply unsettled and at the precipice of war with Nazi Germany. Together with Italy, Hitler was posturing very aggressively. In March of that year, the Japanese government opened a consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania and despatched Chiune to the new diplomatic mission.

It was here that Chiune took on the towering task for which he would be best remembered. He was there not just as the vice-consul at the Japanese Consulate but to work closely with the Polish intelligentsia in monitoring Soviet and German troop movements.

In the following year (1940), the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania, causing an exodus of Polish and Lithuanian Jews to seek passage out of the country. By then grim news of German atrocities and horror stories of the maltreatment of Jews (like the case with Kristallnacht) were resonating throughout all Jewish communities in Europe.

Image source: jewishvirtuallibrary.org

The problem with all of this was that exit visas were scarce since most countries were unwilling to provide them and moreover travelling without one was fraught with unacceptable risks. But none of these stopped the Jewish refugees from rushing to the Japanese Consulate looking for a way out. At this point the only known outlet was via the Dutch consul Jan Zwartendijk who was offering limited opportunities to Curaçao, which was a Dutch colony island requiring no entry visa or Surinam.

The Japanese consulate wasn’t exactly offering easy access either. Tokyo had strict stipulations that visas could only be offered to those who had undergone their stringent immigration procedures and possessed sufficient finance to fund their exits. Either criterion proved one step too far for most refugees at that time, prompting Chiune to persistently seek further directions from the Japanese Foreign Ministry. But every time he called them, the answer was the same – visas were only for those with a third destination in mind. In other words, Japan was only an intermediate destination and nothing more. And if the refugee could neither name nor gain approval to a third destination, the matter was closed. 

Issuing Visas

Image source: visasforlife.org

By now Chiune was becoming anxious. From July 18 to August 28 of 1940, refugees were facing serious possibilities of being left languishing because the visa issuance problem was proving too intractable. It looked more likely that he would be witnessing a disaster of catastrophic proportions. If these Jews could not gain that invaluable point of escape, they would simply perish.

“I may have to disobey my government but if I do not, I will be disobeying God,” he had then said to his wife, Yukiko.

“I knew I should follow my conscience.”

Not getting the answer he needed from the Foreign Ministry, he decided to act on his initiative and began to grant 10-day transit visas himself, knowing that such an act was in conflict with his own government. Not only that nobody was in any position to issue these visas; he did not have the prerequisite authorisation within the Consulate to be taken seriously.

At the same time, such actions were simply unheard of at the Japanese Foreign Service bureaucracy because Chiune’s behaviour, by their cultural standards, was largely considered an act of rebellion or disobedience. It was, plainly put, unprecedented. Being “merely” a transit visa, Chiune then arranged with Soviet officials to grant a travel-through for the Jewish refugees so that they could also access the Trans-Siberian Railway even though it was five times the normal boarding fare.

Image source: jewishpost.com

Having taken such serious matters into his hands, Chiune spent up to 18 to 20 hours every day and night to issue exit visas at a rate equivalent to a normal month’s worth on a daily basis, which was about 300 visas, all painstakingly handwritten. It was a passion by necessity – Chiune worked tirelessly without taking proper meals in between, surviving almost essentially on sandwiches on the run with Yukiko preparing them and leaving them by his side for him to take as and when he could. By nightfall, he would endure painful cramps in his hands to which his wife would lovingly massage for him. Chiune would carry this out continuously until September 4 when he was compelled to leave his post prior to the closure of the Japanese Consulate.

By the time that he was ready to leave, he had already paved the way for not hundreds but thousands of Jews to leave including their entire families. Even on the night of their departure, Chiune and his wife were still frantically writing out visa approvals to get as many Jews out of the country as they could. The situation had gotten so desperate for some Jews that they scaled the walls of their residence just to earnestly kneel and beg before the Japanese couple.

Even when they had boarded the train at the Kaunas Railway Station getting prepared to leave once and for all, witnesses reported that the couple were literally throwing visa approvals out of the train window to the gathering crowd of anxious Jewish refugees. In fact many of these ‘approvals’ were simply blanks that had the mark of the official consulate stamp and his signature, thus allowing the refugees to complete the rest for the safe passage out of the country.

As the train began to pull out of the station, Chiune was seen sticking out of the window, saying to the crowd, “Please forgive me. I cannot write anymore. I wish you the best.” And then heart-stricken and with welled tears, he bowed in typical Japanese submissiveness to which some said loudly, “Sugihara, we will never forget you! I will surely see you again!”

Look for Part Two on November 7 2014