Chiune Sugihara: A Japanese Diplomat Who Saved Jews 

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Chiune (Sempo) Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat, received the title, “Righteous Among the Nations,” from Israel’s Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in 1984. The reason? While serving as vice-consul for Japan in Kaunas (also known as Kovno), Lithuania, Sugihara helped thousands of Jews flee Europe by issuing them transit visas so that they could travel through Japanese territory. He risked his job and the lives of his family to do so. 

Born to a middle-class family in Japan’s Gifu Prefecture on Honshu, he excelled in school, and his father wanted him to become a doctor. Sugihara’s dream was to enter the foreign service, however, and he deliberately failed the medical school entrance exam by writing only his name on it. In 1919, Chiune passed the foreign ministry Scholarship exam and served in the Japanese Imperial Army as a second lieutenant stationed in Korea. He resigned his commission in 1922 and trained for the Foreign Ministry, learning Russian, German, and English. He aced the qualifying exam and was sent to work in the foreign office in Harbin, China. While there, Sugihara perfected his Russian by conversing with the city’s emigres. He resigned that post because of rising Japanese violence against the Chinese, returning to Japan, where he married and started a family.

Because of his fluency in Russian, Japan sent Sugihara to Kaunas, the capital of Lithuania, in 1939. His job was to provide Japan with intelligence on Soviet and German troop movements in the Baltic region. He also exchanged information with members of the Polish underground in Lithuania and issued them transit visas through Japan. At that time, approximately one-third of Lithuanians were Jewish. The Soviets persecuted Jews so they wanted out, especially because Germany was occupying more and more of Eastern Europe and would soon arrive in Lithuania. Hundreds of them, mostly Orthodox, visited the Japanese consulate to beg for exit visas to Japan. The official Japanese policy was that candidates for visas go through elaborate bureaucratic procedures and pay significant sums of money. Sugihara contacted his superiors at the Japanese foreign ministry to ask if the rules could be relaxed to help Jewish refugees. His request was denied.

Sugihara could have told the Jews that he could do nothing for them, but instead, his sense of right and wrong prevailed. He ignored his orders and started issuing ten-day visas for Jews to travel through Japan on their way to safe havens such as Shanghai, China, where 20,000 Jews endured the war safely. As word got out about the Japanese visas, Jews from all over Lithuania and Poland began to swarm Sugihara’s office. He would not deny anyone and spent 18 to 20 hours a day writing visas by hand. He created a month’s supply of visas every day from August to early September 1940, providing an escape route for thousands of Jews. Before closing the consulate, he even gave transit visas to refugees without complete travel papers. 

After issuing approximately 1,800 visas, Sugihara received a cable from Tokyo telling him, “You must make sure that [refugees] have finished their procedure for their entry visas and also that they possess the travel money or the money that they need during their stay in Japan. Otherwise, you should not give them the transit visa.”
Replying to the cable, Sugihara admitted issuing visas to those who had not completed everything to obtain them, explaining the situation thusly: Japan was the only transit country available to those going toward the United States; his visas were needed for departure for the Soviet Union. He suggested that travelers arriving in Vladivostok with incomplete paperwork be banned from boarding a ship for Japan. Tokyo wrote back that the Soviet Union insisted that Japan honor all visas already issued by its consulates. By the time Sugihara left Lithuania, he’d issued visas to 2,140 persons. Unfortunately, not all of these people could leave Lithuania before the Soviet Union stopped granting exit visas.

Sugihara left Lithuania in September 1940. He was transferred to Prague and then to Bucharest, Germany’s ally. He remained there until after the war. During the Soviet army’s march through the Balkans in 1944, the Soviets arrested Sugihara and other diplomats from enemy nations. He and his family were held for three years. When Sugihara returned to Japan in 1947, the foreign ministry retired him as part of a staff reduction enacted under the U.S. occupation. 

Unemployable in Japan, Sugihara spent the next 16 years working in the Soviet Union while his wife and sons stayed in Japan. His heroism unknown for many years, Sugihara was contacted in 1968 by an attaché working at the Israeli consulate in Tokyo who’d heard about the Japanese hero. Sugihara traveled to Israel as an honored guest of the Israeli government. Jews he’d saved lobbied for him to be recognized by Yad Vashem, and in 1984 he received the honor. At that time he was too sick to travel, so his wife and son Nobuki accepted the award on his behalf. 

Sugihara died in Japan in 1986. Despite recognition of his heroism by Israel and Jews worldwide, he was unknown in his own country. Even his children didn’t know what he had done. A huge delegation from around the world attended his funeral. Only then did he become known in Japan.