The Fugu Plan: The Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews During World War Two - Softcover

Tokayer, Marvin; Swartz, Mary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 083480350X ISBN 13: 9780834803503

Publisher: Weatherhill, 1996

Synopsis

A top-secret plan to create an "Israel in Asia" under Japanese control offered a safe haven in Asia for European Jewish refuges during WWII, in exchange for which their economic and technical skills would be put to work modernizing Manchuria. While the plan foundered in 1940, the lives of thousands of Jews were saved by the transit visas they had been given by the Japanese.

About this title

About the Author:

Rabbi Marvin Tokayer began his rabbinic career in 1962 as a U.S. Air Force chaplain stationed in southern Japan. In 1968, he returned to serve as rabbi of the one-thousand-member Jewish Community of Japan, a post he held until 1976; he remains Lifetime Honorary Rabbi of the community. He also served on the Federation of Jewish Communities of Southeast Asia and the Far East and as Founding Board Member of the Sino-Judaic Institute. Consummate storyteller Rabbi Tokayer contributed seven articles on rabbinics and the Orient for the Encyclopedia Judaica; authored twenty books in Japanese on Judaica and Japan; and coauthored (with Mary Swartz) The Fugu Plan The Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews during World War II.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

INTRODUCTION TO THE CURRENT EDITION

Twenty-five years have passed since The Fugu Plan first appeared. In 1979, so little was known of Japan’s plan to resettle up to a million European Jewish refugees in its puppet state of Manchukuo that the New York Times published a news story about the book. Now, the fugu plan is widely recognized as one of the few positive, if strange, twists in the tortured fate of European Jewry.

Over these years, one person has come to be the human face of the fugu plan: Chiune Sugihara. From November 1939 to September 1940, Sugihara was officially the Japanese consul in Kovno (or "Kaunas"), Lithuania. In reality, Sugihara had been sent to Kovno to gather intelligence about Soviet and German troop movements in the area. Because he was there, however, and because of who he was, Sugihara became one of the crucial players in the fugu plan -- a scheme that, by the war’s end, would save the lives of thousands of Jews, as well as the entire Mir Yeshiva, whose scholars would survive to inspire a new era of Jewish learning in the U.S. and Israel.

Books and articles in English, Japanese, Hebrew and Chinese, running the gamut from scholarly to mass-appeal, are now being written about Sugihara – "the Japanese angel". In Japan, the name ‘Sugihara’ has become a symbol of one who takes care of others. His life is the subject of a secondary school English language text. A plaque at the gaimusho, the Japanese Foreign Ministry, commemorates his humanitarianism, in spite of the fact that he had disregarded orders from his superiors. In Israel, Sugihara is honored by Yad Vashem among the "Righteous of the Nations". And in the spring of this year, PBS will air, nationwide, an award-winning documentary, "Conspiracy of Kindness" about Sugihara’s life and the lives of a few of the many people he saved.

Over the past 25 years, we have learned a great deal about this man. Chiune (or Senpo, he used either of two first names) Sugihara was born with the century, on January 1, 1900, and was raised in the bushido/samurai philosophy of his mother’s family. Though his father – in pre-war Japan, the unquestioned authority in such matters -- directed him to study law, Sugihara’s own interests were in foreign languages and cultures. Circumventing his father, he applied to the gaimusho and was sent to Harbin, Manchuria, to study Russian. For the next ten years, Sugihara remained in Manchuria, marrying and later divorcing a Russian woman, and only rarely returning to Japan for brief visits. Starting with his posting to Lithuania in 1939, he spent eight years in Europe, going wherever the gaimusho saw fit to move him: Berlin, Prague, Konigsberg, and finally, at the war’s end, Bucharest, Romania. There, he was arrested by the incoming Soviet forces and, with his wife and three children, interned for two years before being allowed to return to Japan.

In post-war Tokyo, there was little work available for a former, low-level diplomat. Sugihara managed to keep his family together only with small jobs that made use of his language skills. He worked intermittently at the American PX; he served as an announcer for the foreign language bureau of NHK, Japan’s national radio; he free-lanced translation and interpreting services; and finally, in an almost unbelievable quirk of fate, he was hired by a Ginza clothing store whose owner, Anatole Ponve, had been one of the leaders of the Kobe Jewish community which had cared for the ‘Sugihara refugees’ when they first arrived in Japan in 1940. But in spite of seeing Ponve virtually every day, Sugihara never mentioned his own role in the rescue of the Jewish refugees.

I asked him about that a few years before he died.

"I never knew what happened to the refugees," he said. "I never knew if they got past the Soviet Union, if they actually came to Japan, if they ever found safety. I didn’t want to discuss it because perhaps I had only led them to their death. I was afraid to bring it up."

Did he know, I wondered, about the fugu plan?

"I only knew about that when you told me. If I had known, it would have been much easier for me. I wouldn’t have felt the sole burden of responsibility for issuing the visas."

Finally, I asked him the one crucial question: Why did he do it? To the best of anyone’s knowledge, before July 1940 Sugihara had never had any personal contact with Jews. Why, then, did he risk his career and possibly his life to save the lives of these refugees?

He looked at me as if he didn’t really understand the question. "I just did what we as human beings should do. One of my best teachers, in Harbin, once told me: You do the right thing because it is the right thing. Not for gain. Not for recognition. Just because it is the right thing. The refugees were people who needed my help. I could give help to them. It was the right thing to do. That's all."

In the midst of the horror of 1940, it was the extreme good fortune of thousands of Jewish refugees, and tens of thousands of their descendants, that a rare man such as Sugihara was there when their lives depended on it.

Marvin Tokayer
2004

About this edition

• Publisher: Weatherhill
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 083480350X
• ISBN 13: 9780834803503
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 287