Risking Honor and Career to Save Refugees
As shared by Sue Lyke
An Unknown Hero Early Years: Seeds of Remarkableness
Marriages, Conversion to Christianity Consternation to Courage Consequences
Resources
(Editor's Note: This story flows from Sue's first-hand experience with refugees. She volunteered for 2 weeks in 1999 in a Catholic Relief Services camp for Kosovars who were fleeing their province during the NATO bombing. Currently, she tutors a Liberian refugee and teaches basic English to refugees. She is inspired and challenged by Chiune who risked "job, comfort, family, and honor to help strangers.")
“Honor” and “obedience” are attributes commonly ascribed to the Japanese character. Indeed, images of Samurai warriors; kamikaze pilots and seppuku (ritualized suicide); respect for elders, and; giri (honor, name, face) are firmly fixed in many Westerners’ impressions of the Japanese spirit.
Yet out of this culture and character arose a hero little known in the United States whose personal obedience to humanity apparently superceded national honor: Chiune Sugihara.
Chiune (pronounced chee-YU-nay) Sugihara, a former Japanese intelligence officer, issued more than 2,000 transit visas in 1940 to Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi regime. While facts are scant, ambiguous and contradictory, it’s clear that Sugihara issued these life-saving visas in disobedience to official orders, at risk of his career, security and “face” in his country, as well as by the German and Soviet governments, out of a profound respect for humanity. In 1985, less than a year before Chiune’s death, Yad Vashem in Israel conferred upon him the title “Righteous Gentile,” a stature which implies extraordinary efforts to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust at risk even to one’s own life. He is credited with saving perhaps as many as 10,000 lives.
The early years of Chiune Sugihara (1900-1986) hint at the independence and remarkableness which later guided his break with authority to the foreign ministry of Japan. Perhaps the coincidence of Chiune’s birth on January 1 in the new century of 1900 portended his remarkable future. He was born in the small Japanese town of Yaotsu. 
Chiune’s parents lived in some prominence as his mother’s lineage included Samurai ancestry and aristocrats. His father was the Emperor’s local tax collector and his mother’s beauty was renown. In 1910, after Japan annexed Korea, his father was sent to Seoul to work in colonial service for the Japanese government in Korea. His father left his government post in 1915 but remained in Korea, running an inn outside of Seoul. His wife joined him in 1917.
As a young school child, Chiune was expected to learn and follow the Samurai spirit and code of conduct, and to respect elders. However, a rift grew between his father and himself over the question of his vocation. Chiune’s father desired his son to become a doctor. Chiune himself wanted to become a teacher and clung to this plan to the point of purposefully failing the medical school examination. Because of this persistent disagreement, Chiune’s father eventually disowned him.
In 1919, Chiune enrolled in Waseda University, solely responsible for his tuition and life expenses. He withdrew from the University after the first semester apparently because he could not afford the expenses. In the late fall of 1919, Chiune took the foreign ministry exam which would entitle 14 students to study abroad with subsidies for schooling and living expenses. He passed the exam and chose to study in Russia after his first choice of Spain was awarded to another student. He was assigned to the school in Harbin, in Manchuria in northeastern China. At this time, Harbin was a hotbed of religious, ethnic and political diversity because of a recently built railway and Chiune would have come into contact with people from many differing national, ethnic and religious backgrounds, including Jews. Chiune seems to have been a diligent student who became fluent in Russian as well as learning English, Chinese, German and French.
Chiune is recalled as a kind, generous, respectful and social man during his youthful years studying, living and working in Harbin, and throughout his career with the foreign ministry. A further testimony to his independence from tradition was his marriage in 1924 to Klaudia Semionovna Appollonova, a White Russian. They divorced in 1935, by “mutual consultation.” He converted from Buddhism to Russian Orthodox to marry Klaudia. She and her family moved into the official living residence he had with his posting in Harbin, an unusual family configuration by Japanese standards of that time. There’s some speculation that the marriage by this ambitious career intelligence officer might have helped open doors to information regarding the movements and thinking of the White Russian community. Later life musings of his former wife recall a great mutual fondness and no hint that theirs was a marriage of convenience.
In 1936, Chiune married Yukiko Kikuchi, whom he met through her brother while visiting Tokyo. Together they had three sons. She joined him in most of his foreign country postings. Her younger sister lived with them much of the time, as well, in part to help Yukiko with her children’s care.
(Background on Lithuania in 1940-- In September 1939, Hitler’s regime conquered Western Poland while Stalin occupied much of the eastern part. More than 10,000 Polish refugees fled Poland for neutral Lithuania during and after the German advance. Most of them settled in Vilna [Vilnius], which became a rich and thriving center for Jewish theological, spiritual and cultural life. Soviet Union annexed Lithuania in July 1940, putting the Jews in peril and flight once again.)
Sugihara was appointed to open the first Japanese consulate in Kovno (Kaunas) Lithuania, which he did in September 1939. His appointment seems unusual on face value. To this point, Chiune’s professional duties had been as interpreter and secretary with a brief interim diplomatic stint in Helsinki. The foreign ministry kept his posting low-key and gave him the title of vice counsel. He was accountable not to the Japanese consul general in Riga, but to the Foreign Minister in Tokyo. This and the appointment of someone with such little diplomatic experience hints at his superiors‘ desire for intelligence gathering on the Soviet and German intentions at this crucial border between Russia and the German front.
Visa issuance was of little importance to a surveillance posting such as Sugihara’s in Lithuania. His memos to his superiors and the Tokyo office showed his awareness of the mounting presence of refugees in Lithuania as well as on the conditions inside of Poland from his Polish informants. Jewish and non-Jewish families befriended Sugihara and his wife.
Sugihara began issuing transit visas to Jewish and non-Jewish Polish refugees initially in keeping with Japanese diplomatic policy. Transit visas were issued to anyone who had a destination beyond Japan and the money to support themselves during their intended short stay in Japan. 
As the war intensified and Soviet presence in Lithuania grew, lines of refugees began forming outside of consulates.
A fascinating and bold duet played (from mid-May 1940 through the end of July) between the official Dutch representative and Vice Consul Sugihara. The honorary Dutch consul, a businessman named Jan Zwartendijk, began stamping passports with a final destination visa for the Dutch West Indies island of Curacau in response to at least one request from a Jewish refugee. These visas gave the Jewish refugees an end point outside of Lithuania and were sufficient in Sugihara’s mind for him to issue the transit visa to Japan. He sought and received Soviet permission for the refugees holding his transit visas to travel via the Trans-Siberian railroad to Vladivostok. Once there, they could board one of the boats making the Vladivostok to Tsuruga (Japan) run.
However, Sugihara clearly broke with official policy when he began issuing visas to any threatened refugee who arrived at his consulate. He wired his government at least three times for permission to issue more visas and was denied permission. His wife recalled that his decision to continue issuing the visas despite the official prohibition caused Sugihara consternation and concern.
On August 11, 1940, Sugihara began issuing transit visas to Japan without official permission, working as long as 20 hours a day meticulously writing the characters which formed the visa. Records show he issued the much desired transit visas to numerous people who had neither the requisite final-destination visa nor money. Visa recipients recalled his painstaking attempts to find rationale for issuing them a visa when it was clearly in violation of his mandate.
From the 20th of August, Chiune began receiving telegrams from the home office and the ship captains telling about an increasing crowded number of Polish refugees seeking to board Japanese ships in Russia with transit visas issued by Sugihara. They also described the increasingly chaotic situation near Vladivostok and the Japanese port cities of Tsuruga, Kobe and Yokohama.
In addition to jeopardizing his career, Sugihara’s actions certainly put him at risk from the German and Soviet governments on whose good graces he was dependent. There is evidence from some of the cables of this period that some Germans were growing suspicious of Sugihara’s actions and loyalties. Sugihara successfully delayed closing his consulate for one month beyond the official deadline after seeking an extension from the Soviet officials now stationed in Kovno. The relatively minor consulate responsibility of visa issuance now became a primary task. Once he closed the consulate in late August, Sugihara continued to handwrite and issue visas -- first from the lobby of the Hotel Metropolis, again at the train station, and even from the window of his car before it pulled out from the station. Yukiko remembers massaging her husband’s cramped hands throughout that late summer and early fall.
After a series of short postings in and near Germany during the next seven years, Sugihara’s formal government career ended. In early September, the Sugiharas boarded the train for Berlin. Once there, he received orders to move to Prague, and then Konigsberg, Germany. He continued to issue visas from both Praque and Konigsberg. His final posting was to Bucharest. Following the Japanese surrender in 1945, Chiune and his family lived in several internment camps in Russia during the next 18 months. The Sugiharas were allowed to return to Japan in April 1947.
His return to Japan was hardly triumphant. Sugihara sought a new post-war assignment with the Foreign Ministry after his return but was instead asked to resign. Sugihara did odd jobs for many years, including selling light bulbs door-to-door. In 1960, he took a job in Moscow working for an export plant until he retired in 1976. Sugihara was separated from his family most of those years except for his biannual visits. Acquaintances, friends and relatives describe him as dour, discouraged and withdrawn during this period, as if he’d lost face for himself and his family.
In 1968, Yehoshua Nisri, a former Polish teenager who’d been issued a Japanese transit visa, tracked down Sugihara. Now working for the Israeli Embassy in Tokyo, Nisri, told Sugihara of the many Jewish survivors because of his visas.
In 1976, Sugihara formally retired with Yukiko to a small house outside of Tokyo. In 1985 Chiune was awarded the “Righteous among the Nations” medal by the Israeli government. A monument was erected in memory of his actions in Kaunas during a celebration of Lithuanian independence in 1991, and a street was named after him. Before his death, a Japanese civic group formally apologized to Chiune, Yukiko and their children, and he was awarded the Nagasaki peace prize.
Acknowledgement
Gratitude to Sojourners for use of picture of Chiune Sugihara
in the Nov/Dec 2002 issue of their magazins.
