When I visited the United States last April this year, I met one Jewish gentleman at a conservative synagogue in New Haven. He immediately mentioned Mr. Sugihara and told me that he would read a book about him. As for "The Fugu Plan", please refer to my Japanese blog (http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily/20130510） (Lily)
New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com)
An Evacuation of Jews, With Help From Japan, 5 March 2014
by James Barron
It is not the usual subject for a tourism video: how Japanese officials — including a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania and an employee of a tourist bureau — helped Jews flee the Nazis just before World War II.
The Japan National Tourism Organization plans to show the 10-minute video at Grand Central Terminal on Thursday, the first day of Japan Week, a celebration of Japanese culture and tourism from the past 100 years. Through Saturday in Vanderbilt Hall, the organization will operate a replica of a bar from Japan’s Taisho period, named for the emperor who reigned from 1912 to 1926. Attendants in traditional dress will serve sake from different regions of Japan.
The video, made by faculty members of the New York Film Academy, explains that as German forces moved across Europe, time was running out for Jews seeking to flee when help came from an unlikely source: Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese vice consul in Kovno, the second-largest city in Lithuania.
Defying his superiors in Tokyo, he issued transit visas to Jews, making it possible for them to travel by train to Vladivostok, Russia, and then to Japan aboard an aging ship. Mr. Sugihara’s story was documented in “The Fugu Plan,” a 1979 book by Mary Swartz and Rabbi Marvin Tokayer, who was an Air Force chaplain in Japan in the 1960s and later spent 10 years as the only English-speaking, university-trained rabbi in Japan. Some Holocaust scholars believe that Mr. Sugihara may have saved as many as 10,000 Jews.
Photo: Mr. Osako on a ship. As an employee of a tourist bureau, he and Chiune Sugihara, a diplomat, helped Jews flee the Nazis.
Less well known is the role of Tatsuo Osako, the tourist-bureau employee. For nine months in 1940 and 1941, he was the shipboard escort on the trips from Vladivostok to the Japanese port of Tsuruga. He kept a scrapbook with a poem he composed — it said the ship carried “people without nations” — and photographs of passengers.
“He said he did a diplomatic role as a civilian person,” said Akira Kitade, 70, a retired tourism executive who has written a book about Japanese whose behind-the-scenes assistance helped Jews escape the Nazis. “He was not really a diplomat, but what he did was a diplomatic role. He and Mr. Sugihara helped Jewish people. We really have to be proud of that.”
As it happened, Mr. Osako was Mr. Kitade’s boss in the 1960s, but Mr. Kitade said that Mr. Osako never mentioned his work on the ship. Mr. Kitade only learned of it years later from a commemorative volume published by the Japan Tourist Board, which during the war was a quasi-governmental agency.
Eventually, he asked Mr. Osako about the Vladivostok-to-Tsuruga trips and read an essay Mr. Osako had written about them. Mr. Kitade also did research that showed the Japan Tourist Board had received money from Jewish organizations in the United States and from Japanese government agencies, and had promised to transport the refugees to Japan.
Mr. Kitade has said that many in the West assume that Japan, as a German ally, was anti-Semitic. But Rabbi Tokayer said in a phone interview this week that ordinary Japanese “had a different agenda from the government.” The government, he said, “could do whatever it wanted vis-à-vis Germany.”
“The person in the street was kind and friendly and supportive” of the Jews who arrived in Tsuruga, Rabbi Tokayer said. He added: “When the refugees got off the ship, each got a gift. The gift was an apple. They went to school to learn basic Japanese for free. They got free medical care. Farmers brought them free food.”
Some Japanese and Jewish scholars refer to Mr. Sugihara as the “Japanese Schindler,” a reference to Oskar Schindler, the German manufacturer who saved Jews from the Nazis. Some say Mr. Sugihara’s diplomatic career ended because he had issued the visas. When he returned to Japan after the war — after postings in Czechoslovakia and Romania and 18 months in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp — he resigned from the diplomatic corps. He later worked as an oil exporter in Moscow. He died in 1986.
“Mr. Sugihara struggled a lot with what he could do,” said Yuki Tanaka, the executive director of the Japan National Tourism Organization’s office in New York. “It was really a hard decision. And for Mr. Osako’s part, I think the first hard decision was made by J.T.B. itself.”
The Japan Tourist Board’s New York office had received a call asking if it could help with the evacuation of Jews. The officials in the New York office “knew it was kind of contradicting the thinking about the relationship between Japan and Germany,” Ms. Tanaka said. “This might cause some trouble.”
“They reported it to the headquarters” in Tokyo, she added, “and the headquarters had a really hard discussion, and finally they thought they should save Jewish people based on a humanitarian point of view.”
Asked whether she would have done what Mr. Osako did if the occasion had presented itself, Ms. Tanaka said: “I really hope I could. It was really a great thing, what he did.”
Correction: April 5, 2014
An article in some editions on March 6 about a video shown at Grand Central Terminal in honor of Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese official who helped Jews escape Lithuania during World War II, omitted an author of “The Fugu Plan,” a book about Mr. Sugihara’s efforts. Besides Marvin Tokayer, Mary Swartz also wrote the book.
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