'Japanese Schindler' likely to have saved fewer Jews in WWII than Tokyo claimed: academics

Tokyo has exaggerated the activities in Lithuania in 1940 of a diplomat known as the "Japanese Schindler" to win favour with Israel and Jewish interests in the United States, according to a number of Israeli and Japanese academics.

They also claim the Japanese government has promoted the narrative that Chiune Sugihara was a national hero who issued visas to save thousands of Jews from the Nazis, to shift the narrative - both domestically and internationally - away from Japan being an aggressor from the 1930s to 1940s, the militaristic nation that was accused of perpetrating the Nanking massacre, comfort women, forced labourers and widespread abuses of Allied prisoners of war.

A paper by Rotem Kowner, a professor at the University of Haifa, published in The American Historical Review in March, stated that Sugihara "has become a national hero in Japan and is considered a paragon of virtue in a number of other countries", but that heroism has been "manipulated" for Japan's motives.

Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.

Oskar Schindler - made famous in the award-winning 1993 Steven Spielberg film Schindler's List - was a German industrialist and member of the Nazi Party who nevertheless saved the lives of at least 1,200 Jews who worked in his enamelware and munitions factories in occupied Poland.

Since the mid-1990s, Sugihara has appeared in Japanese school history books as the diplomat who used his position to issue more than 6,000 visas to fleeing Jews to travel across Siberia to safety in Japan.

The accounts claim he worked 20 hours a day until he was forced to leave the consulate in Kaunas on September 4, 1941. At the time, Lithuania was a part of the Soviet Union, which was invaded on June 22, 1941, by Nazi Germany, a member of the Axis Powers alongside Japan and other states.

Movie depictions of Sugihara's story show him throwing visas from the window as his train left the station, and it has also been claimed that he gave the official visa stamps to Jews before he left.

Sugihara's own son, Nobuki, stated in an interview with The Times of Israel in Minsk in 2019 that neither incident happened, and there have been many additional embellishments of his father's story, which was based on the book his mother, Yukiko, published in 1995, nine years after his death at the age of 86.

Nobuki said his mother had not been in Lithuania at the time and wanted to write a "novel, not a documentary", but Sugihara's story quickly became famous in Japan.

Kowner and other academics, including Chiharu Inaba at Meijo University in Nagoya and Meron Medzini, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Department of Asian Studies, have all picked holes in the Japanese government's depictions of Sugihara's actions, according to The Times of Israel.

These discrepancies include dismissing the arguably more critical role of Kaunas-based Dutch diplomat, Jan Zwartendijk, who helped save thousands of Jewish lives by issuing documents for travel to Japan and eventually Dutch-held Curacao, and has effectively been airbrushed out of the Japanese story; and the claim that Sugihara was fired by the foreign ministry when he finally returned to Japan after the war for disobeying orders.

The more prosaic truth is that there was no place for him as the ministry was dramatically slimmed down after Japan's surrender, the academics insist.

The elevation of Sugihara is being continued elsewhere in his homeland, they point out.

The town of Yaotsu claims to be Sugihara's birthplace and has a memorial and museum that attract around 20,000 people a year wishing to pay their respects to the "Japanese Schindler". Staff in the museum insist older residents remember Sugihara.

In truth, Nobuki Sugihara told the Times that his father was born in the city of Mino, about 40km away, and had never lived in Yaotsu. The entire fiction was created to attract tourists, he said.

"It is a very difficult issue and one that is hard to reach an accurate conclusion on, but there is no doubt in my mind that there has been a lot of political manipulation going on," said Yakov Zinberg, a professor of international relations at Tokyo's Kokushikan University.

The basics of the story are factual, said Zinberg, a Jew originally from St Petersburg. Sugihara undoubtedly saved lives, but the details are more difficult to determine and the modern account is "very problematic", he said.

"Nobody spoke of Sugihara before the 1980s, when Japan's relations with the US were not very good," Zinberg said.

"One suggested motive is that Japan believed the Jews were powerful in the media, especially in the US, so they raised the issue of Sugihara to be positively reflected in the media, which suddenly made him popular. This was happening under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and there was clear political thinking behind the move," he said.

"Another motivation was to rehabilitate Japan's reputation with the West," Zinberg added. "What happened in China and the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army were shameful to Tokyo, so it was helpful for Japan to be able to single out a person who actually saved lots of Jews."

After a 16-year campaign by the Japanese government - a delay Kowner says was due to doubts that he had risked his life or professional position to assist Jews - Israel in 1985 honoured Sugihara as one of the Righteous Among the Nations for his actions in Lithuania.

Akio Yoshida, a protestant priest and director of the Holocaust Education Centre in the town of Fukuyama, about 60km from Hiroshima, admits that elements of what have become the uncritical narrative of Sugihara's actions do not completely add up.

"It is not clear how many were able to flee Lithuania using his visas," he said. "The figure in his wife's book was more than 6,000, but now we think it is likely to be less."

The accepted figure among academics now is between 2,000 and 3,000.

"The important thing to remember is that he acted as a humanist and he undoubtedly saved lives," Yoshida added. "Even if the number is exaggerated, that does not change."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.