The Fugu Plan

  The Fugu Plan

  Marvin Tokayer

  The

  Fugu Plan

  To Mazal who made the possible a reality

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IT WOULD BE almost impossible to acknowledge all who deserve it, but we offer our thanks also to the many unmentioned people who have been of help.

  If the reader gains any perspective of the years and events of I939-45, it is a reflection of the vivid glimpses afforded me by Ezekiel Abraham, Zelig Belokamen, Millie Campanella, Dr. Abraham J. Cohn, Rabbi Joseph D. Epstein, Benjamin Fishoff, Joseph Genger, Jan Goldsztejn, Nathan Gutwirth, Leo Hanin, Michael Ionis, Horace Kadoorie, Sir Lawrence Kadoorie, Irving Rosen, Alex Triguboff and Dina Waht. They shared memories, feelings and experiences, perhaps at great personal cost.

  A number of scholars, including the late Professor Setsuzo Kotsuji, motivated and encouraged me with useful facts and insights. I am also grateful for information obtained from Senpo Sugihava, Mitsugi Shibata, Mitsuzo Tamura, Mrs. Koreshige Inuzuka and Hiroo Yasue.

  Mr. Michael Kogan deserves a special expression of gratitude for the many hours spent discussing with me the history of those years, and for the use of his collection of top secret and highly confidential Japanese Foreign Ministry documents.

  For their love, devotion and friendship, my personal thanks go to Walter J. Citrin, President of the Jewish Community of Japan and all the congregants and members. Their valuable recollections and constant impetus were refreshing moments during arduous years of research.

  No amount of appreciation can repay my debt to the World Jewish Congress, Joint Distribution Committee, YIVO Library, National Archives and Records Service and the Library of Congress for research help and use of their papers. When the cost of translating Japanese documents became prohibitive, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture lent financial support.

  I have learned much from three giants of Far Eastern Jewish history. Dr. Herman Dicker who was the pioneer writer in this field and whose contributions formed the basis of present and future works, is the beacon in the dark for those who wish to know the subject. A special debt of gratitude is due Dr. David Kranzler who has devoted many precious years in the pursuit of learning and disseminating the history of the Jewish refugee community in Shanghai, and the Japanese policy toward Jews. I leaned heavily on his Japanese, Nazis and Jews a fully documented and comprehensive description and analysis of this period - and he graciously gave of his experience, data and advice. Professor Rudolf Loewenthal provided encouragement in my research, and allowed me to consult his valuable thesis, Japanese and Chinese Materials Pertaining to the Jewish Catastrophe.

  Writers will occasionally overlook the fact that the foresight and perception of the publisher is perhaps equal to the work itself. Paddington Press was enthusiastic about the idea of this book when not even an outline was available and before one word was typed onto a page, and my special thanks go to Richard Ehrlich of Paddington Press and Alan Joseph who first introduced us.

  Last, but not least, I humbly accept the blessing of my marriage because it was my wife who typed the first manuscript and whose inspiration and tranquility have contributed to every present achievement and will see me through whatever the future brings.

  INTRODUCTION

  BETWEEN I934 and I940 a secret policy was devised in the highest councils of the Japanese government. It could have saved a million Jews from Hitler's Holocaust and even halted the war between Japan and the United States before it began. This was the fugu plan - Tokyo's means of enrolling the talents and skills of European Jewry, plus the capital, influence and sympathy of American Jewry, in the building of Japan's twentieth-century empire, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

  In the I930s the Jewish people seemed - to the devisers of the fugu plan - to have exactly what Japan lacked. Her empire growing rapidly by conquest - needed the capital and financial skills exhibited, for example, by the Rothschilds, Bernard Baruch and Jacob Schiff, and there was a particular shortage of experienced industrialists and technicians who would be willing to settle in the wilderness of Manchukuo (Manchuria) -Japan's newly acquired north China "colony" - to develop the area into a secure buffer zone against the menace of the Soviet Union. Finally, Japan sought to improve her image in the world and reverse the drift of Western, especially American, foreign policy which had begun to go against her. That task, she believed, was one for which the Jews were best suited, since, it was said, they controlled so much of the United States press, broadcast media and film industry.

  In return for Jewish assistance with her problems, Japan was prepared to offer exactly what the Jews needed most: a safe haven from the increasingly brutal anti-Semitism welling up against them in Europe. Japan had neither a tradition of anti-Semitism, nor any interest in it, and in Shinto Japan, Christian antipathy toward Jews had no meaning whatsoever. To the devisers of the fugu plan, a Japanese-Jewish involvement seemed an arrangement made in heaven.

  On earth, it was another matter. From the outset the creators of the fugu plan had undermined their own scheme with two very mistaken beliefs. The first was a gross misunderstanding of the nature of the Jewish people as a whole. (It could scarcely have been otherwise. For years, the primary source of Japanese "knowledge" about world Jewry was that notoriously anti-Semitic piece of fiction masquerading as fact, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion-) Their second misconception concerned the importance of Jews, as economic factors and policy shapers in the Western world. With these two basic mistakes built into the foundation of their plan, the Japanese could not help but build askew. In spite of vast amounts of research, Japanese officials were never able to comprehend certain crucial features of the Jewish situation. The most important of these was that the American Jewish community considered its ties to its political family, America, at least as strong as its ties to its religious family in Europe. Not understanding this, the executors of the fugu plan did not understand, for example, that when they made their proposal to Rabbi Stephen Wise in the winter of 1939, they were confronting not only the principal leader of American Jewry but a Jew whose loyalty to and love for the United States was almost Biblical in its intensity. Had they recognized this and approached him accordingly, the outcome of the Wise meeting, and of the fugu plan itself, might have been very different.

  My own involvement with the fugu plan, though I was unaware of it at the time, began in 1968 when I moved with my family to Tokyo. No sooner had I taken up the position of Rabbi of the Jewish Community of Japan than I realized I had a congregation of "talking books." With the end of World War II and especially with the Communist takeover of mainland China in 1949, virtually all the Jews who had been part of the large foreign community in Shanghai fled. Many of them, particularly those who had lived in Asia all their lives, moved to Tokyo. At first, I would simply chat with these people, of my days at Hebrew High School in New York when many of my teachers had made references to their own experiences as refugees in Shanghai and Japan. As my congregants in Tokyo spun out their anecdotes, I was fascinated by their tales and in awe of their powers of survival. When I realized that no one had yet put together a collection of these remarkable experiences, I began interviewing my congregants in a more organized fashion. For three years, I took notes, taped interviews and gained familiarity with the sometimes scarcely believable story of the flight of thousands of Polish Jews away from the threatening hand of one Axis nation right into the apparently welcoming arms of another. Then, in the early 1970s, I was shown the Kogan Papers.

  The Kogan Papers are a bound set of prewar Foreign-Ministry documents which had been found in the back of a second-hand bookstore in Tokyo and subsequently turned over to a Jewish resident named Michael Kogan. Each of the ten volumes was stamped maru
hi (secret). The originals of the reports, studies and orders that made up the Kogan Papers had, like all the Japanese government's documents, been confiscated by the Allied Occupation Forces shortly after Japan's surrender, and moved to the Library of Congress in Washington. However, because for the most part all such documents were made in duplicate, it was not uncommon for these extra copies to turn up for sale, as the Kogan Papers did, during the early postwar period. Kogan, fluent in Japanese, had scanned some of the onion-skin pages absolutely bewildered. What was this nonsense about a "Jewish settlement in Manchuria"? He himself had lived in Harbin, the capital of Manchuria, while the Japanese were in control of the region; certainly he had heard of no such thing. Michael Kogan came to discuss the documents with me at a time when a Japanese colleague, Hideaki Kase, happened to be in my office in connection with an article he was translating for me. It is, indeed, a very small world: Kase was the son of the secretary of the prewar Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka. Intrigued, he studied the whole set of volumes at length and found that Matsuoka had played a considerable role in the subject matter of those Papers - an involved scheme for manipulating world Jewry that was informally referred to as "the fugu plan."

  Up to the time that Kase reported the contents of the Kogan Papers, I had merely been amassing a collection of reminiscences of a group of Jewish refugees about their lives in Japan and Shanghai during the thirties and World War II. Now I realized that these people, along with many others, had been unwittingly involved in a much more complex series of events. Using the Kogan Papers as a starting point, and with the help of the archives in the Diet Library as well as various clerks in the Japanese Army and Navy and in the Foreign Ministry, I set out to track down as many people as I could find who had actually been involved with the fugu plan. Though Koreshige Inuzuka, a Navy captain who was one of its original creators, had died his wife was not only alive but was very responsive to my request for information. So was the son of Colonel Norihiro Yasue, another officer involved with the plan from the start, and so was the former Shanghai vice-consul, Mitsugi Shibata, and the fugu plan's New York liaison, Mitsuzo Tamura, and every one of the Jews mentioned in the documents whether they lived now in Israel or Hong Kong or even practically next door to me in Tokyo.

  It was a fascinating investigation. I sat for hours with, for example, Shibata, asking questions, changing the tapes on the recorder and learning the human background to the officialese of the Kogan Papers.

  "What was your reaction," I asked him, "to the plans put forth by the Nazi, Colonel Meisinger, at that meeting in Shanghai where .the 'final solution' was first discussed?"

  Shibata rubbed his rounded chin briefly. After thirty-odd years, he remembered it clearly. "I was simply horrified. The atrocities I had heard rumors of were being outlined right in front of my eyes. But I felt so helpless. I am a loyal Japanese! These were our allies. I had to go along with what my superiors were planning, no matter how horrible it was. It was not until later, when I was sitting in the garden of the Japanese Consulate near the Garden Bridge, that I realized what I had to do."

  Shibata and the others consulted their personal journals for half-remembered names and incidents. Without exception, in spite of an initial awkwardness in discussing what they had planned and done, everyone was totally candid and forthcoming.

  In 1976, I left my position in Tokyo to return to the United States. But because I believed that the story of the refugees and of the fugu plan with which they were so intricately involved, deserved better than to be heard only by my friends and future congregations, I asked the help of Mary Swartz, a member of the Tokyo Jewish community and a professional writer. Coincidentally, she was also returning to America about the same time, and the stage was set for the collaboration that has produced this book.

  The question of historical fact versus historical fiction arose early in our manuscript preparations. We both felt strongly that since the entire series of events is factual, we would not change anything for the sake of drama or character development. However, in order to convey the flavor of the refugee experience, we did decide to coalesce some of those hundreds of anecdotes that had been told to me by the Jews from Shanghai, around nine composite characters. As a result there are nine fictional characters: Avram Chesno, Gershon Cohen, Yankel Gilbewitz, Moishe and Sophie Katznelson, Cheya and Getzel Syrkin and their son Dovid, and Ephraim Orliansky. Through them we have described the actual experiences of some of the thousands of Jewish refugees who survived the Holocaust in Japan and Shanghai.

  Other than these nine, all characters in the book are real and, within the reasonable bounds of recounting history, they spoke and acted as presented here.

  MARVIN TOKAYER

  I979

  INTRODUCTION TO THE CURRENT EDITION

  Twenty-five years have passed since The Fugu Plan first appeared. In I979, 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 I939 to September I940, 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 awardwinning 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 Pon
ve 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

  INTRODUCTION BY DAVID ROBINSON *

  In the late sixties, after his duty in Korea and Japan as one of the few Jewish air force chaplains, a young rabbi far from his native Brooklyn began serving his new congregation at the Jewish Center of Tokyo, Japan. Being an inquisitive and curious young fellow, in the Talmudic tradition, he asked questions. Who were his congregants? How had they ended up in Japan? Even in the context of the Diaspora, and the extremes of Holocaust survival, this group of Jews in Tokyo, twenty five years after Pearl Harbor, proved to be a fascinating repository of stories and history; what the rabbi later called "a congregation of talking books." The rabbi loved stories. He loved telling them and he loved hearing them.