The Fugu Plan Read online

  One story was about thousands of mostly Polish Jewish refugees who had been saved from sure death by a Japanese man, in Lithuania in 1939/40. Even more amazing, the Jews had escaped to Japan, from there to Shanghai, and ultimately to hundreds of other points on the globe. Another story was about a secret Japanese government plan to save the Jews of Hitler's Europe.

  Totally enthralled, Rabbi Marvin Tokayer began a quest that has endured these many years. He studied Japanese, Japanese history and religion, and discovered the amazing, extensive, and largely untold history of the relationship between The Jews and The Japanese. He learned all about Jacob Schiff, a Jewish banker, who became an icon in Japan in the early 20th century, by lending Japan the incomprehensibly vast sum of 196 million dollars to defeat Russia in the Russian-Japanese War of 1903. He learned about the Jews of Harbin and Manchuria, and the intricacies of the Japanese plans for world expansion and empire. He discovered what was called the Fugu Plan, and how it could have changed the course of history. He went out and personally interviewed everyone he could find who was connected with these amazing stories, and at long last, he found himself face to face with Chiune Sugihara, the man who had saved the Jews in Eastern Europe some thirty years before.

  * David Rubinson is Executive Producer of the film Sl'GIHAH-i Conspiracy of Kindness.

  In human history, greed and the lust for power are as old as our first footprints in the sand. Why do the stories in The Fugu Plan continue to fascinate us so much now, some sixty years after the Blitzkrieg, much as they fascinated the young rabbi?

  We Humans have decided that this Earth is ours, given to us to do with as we please. We act as if Human Beings are The Chosen, and the Earth is our dominion. We see ourselves, not as fellow beings sharing the Planet Earth with other equal beings, but define ourselves instead by our differences- our physical appearance, our religion, our politics or our material possessions.

  We define ourselves by what we have, what we do. We act, not from the essential human traits of compassion and caring for others, but from expediency, entitlement, utilitarianism and pragmatism, and we Humans, individually and collectively as nations, make daily choices based solely on what is good for ME? What do I GET from this?

  Not- how do I feel, deep inside - what is my gut feeling?

  Not from a deep sense of empathy and shared humanity.

  You can make money if you do this. You can be famous if you do that. You can prove to everyone and to yourself how important or powerful you are. You can WIN or you can HAVE or you can TAKE. And since winning and having and taking make up so much of our lives, we do those things, and we make those choices. And we never stop and wait and feel. We have lost touch with our capacity for compassion that defines us as human beings, for ourselves and thus for anyone else.

  The Fugu Plan is, among many things, about people who make choices. Some of the people act from self-interest or hope of gain or fame or power or salvation. Some others from a deep, inner and basic conviction, compelled by their innate humanity. The Fugu Plan is about how these various choices had profound repercussions on the lives of many thousands of fellow Humans, and upon the world itself.

  In a time when war and massacre, starvation and disease, greed and domination threaten to rule the planet, the stories of The Fugu Plan show us how Humans can act differently, and by so doing, can change the course of History. One of these stories, largely untold even today, is about the actual "Fugu Plan" itself.

  In the 1930s, the most influential Japanese military officers, as well as bankers, industrialists, politicians and aristocrats, debated the most effective methods to fulfill their desired destiny of a world empire. Certainly, they had achieved enormous success, including the invasion and capture of Manchuria, by military means. But some members of the group had another idea. There was a choice, they said.

  Why not spend the money, resources, and time in a better way? A way that would be more constructive, not so wasteful of human life, perhaps longer lasting, and definitely cheaper? Why not dominate the world by trade instead of military expansion or war? But to do this, the Japanese decided that they needed to conscript who they strongly believed to be the best of the world's tradesmen and manufacturers, people who in the view of the Japanese, knew how to make quality goods, raise financing, develop markets, and who had powerful friends in America. They decided that they needed The Jews.

  Thus was born the "Fugu Plan"- designed to take in Europe's Jews, deliver them from the Nazis and those seeking to exterminate them, and bring them by the tens of thousands to Manchuria and Japanese territory. The Japanese could populate the sparse land they had conquered but could not occupy, and, at the same time, staff themselves with talented people who could build their businesses, provide expertise in manufacturing, run their factories, and carry on international trade, especially in the USA.

  The Japanese made their offer to the World Jewish Congress in New York. To their amazement, and disappointment, they were unceremoniously turned down. The militarists won the debate, the "Fugu Plan" failed and died.

  Another story that Rabbi Tokayer heard regularly was about the Japanese consul in Lithuania. Few could even remember his name, and many had just scraps of paper or fleeting memories. One thing they all agreed was that a Japanese man had given them what no other representative from any other nation on earth was willing to give, in that horrifying and deadly time after the Nazi invasion of Poland. He opened a door when all were closed. He gave them visas. A way out. He gave them their lives.

  Rabbi Tokayer had never heard this story before. A Japanese savior of Jews? Jews escaping to Japan. He began to dig for any scrap of information. And what he found changed his life, as it changed mine, and those of so many of us who have read this book.

  He discovered that the Japanese foreign ministry had sent its best German and Russian speaking career diplomat to Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania in 1939, to "gather intelligence" on Nazi and Soviet troop movements. Lithuania in 1939 was, for a very brief period, a free nation, a safe haven buffering Nazi occupied Poland to the West, and the USSR to the East. Jewish refugees from Poland were streaming into this last remaining safe haven in Eastern Europe.

  By a strange twist of luck, and some daring rule bending, some Jews of Dutch nationality discovered that they did not require visas to enter the distant Dutch protectorate of Curacao, invitingly close to the United States. They could not travel to Curacao by going west or north, all Nazi-conquered land. They would have to travel east, many weeks' journey on the Trans Siberian Railroad, past the Gulags, the slave labor camps, to the Russian port of Vladivostok, and then via Japan.

  The destination was far less important than just getting OUT of Nazi dominated Europe. Get out and then worry about where to go from there.

  But the world was populated much as it is today, by people lacking compassion, who acted in pure self-interest, expediency, and greed. There wasn't a nation on earth that would help them, not one of the thirty foreign embassies and consulates in Lithuania, not the American Embassy, not the British nor the French. There were excruciatingly few human beings anywhere who would even risk being perceived as helpful.

  What was in it for them? What would they GET? There were orders to follow, and careers to protect, and there was money to be made. And the chances of a Jew finding a Japanese savior in Lithuania- what were the odds of that?

  And so, while the world turned its back, and his government forbade him to help, with the Red Army now occupying Lithuania, and the Nazi Army gathered on the Lithuanian border - Chiune Sugihara looked out the window of his small house in Kaunas, at a motley crowd of panicked Jewish refugees desperate for the visas that would give them their lives, and he looked into his heart.

  At last Rabbi Tokayer, after years of searching, letter writing and pleading, got to meet and interview Chiune Sugihara, living in poor obscurity. The rabbi finally asked Sugihara: Why did he do it? Why did he decide to save those people?

  Chiune could not comprehend the ques
tion. What did he mean? Why did he do it? The question made no sense.

  He did it because it was the only thing to do of course. These people were to die if he did nothing. There WAS no question. He did what any other man would have done, said Chiune Sugihara.

  And that is why this book is so terribly relevant, significant, and important right now.

  If one person who reads this book, stops and says: "I can do that."

  "I can act from my deep humanity and sense of compassion and love."

  "I can forget the expediencies of the world, the pragmatic and the profit making, what I am told to do, and even what is best for me, and just do what I know inside is the right thing to do."

  Then the world will immediately, even if infinitesimally, change course.

  Sugihara's visas saved thousands. The living descendants of those he saved now number over fifty thousand human beings.

  One book read, one deed done, one mind changed, one small shift in the course of events, and who knows what vast repercussions can result?

  After all, this book started with a young rabbi from Brooklyn at a synagogue in Tokyo.

  David Rubinson

  2004

  With deepest gratitude and profound respect for my good friend Moishe

  CHRONOLOGY

  1

  SENPO SUGIHARA, Japanese consul in Kovno, Lithuania, sat half-awake on the edge of his bed. He shivered in the chill of early morning. It was 5:15 - no hour for any civilized person to be stirring. What woke him? Usually it was his wife who responded to noises from the children. But she, and the children, were still sleeping soundly. Yet there had definitely been a sound . . . and there it was again: a shushing, rustling, almost whispering stir from just outside the house.

  Sugihara wrapped his yukata more closely around him, padded across the floor and peered out of a window.

  "Chik-sho!" He immediately jumped back. The army was out there! The invasion had come overnight! They were forming ranks, under his window! Sliding across the bare floor, he quickly woke his wife. Within seconds he had shuttled her and the children into the security of the closet. Then he alone returned to peek out of the window.

  At second glance, it was not such a military scene. True, there were a great many people, and most of them men, but they were not preparing for battle. They were simply staring - staring up at his bedroom window.

  "Nan-de o? Do desho-ka? What are they doing here? What do they want with me?"

  But even as he whispered the questions to himself, he knew the answers. Far from being soldiers, those gaunt, poorly dressed men were civilian refugees, Jews. Originally from Poland, driven out of their homes by the Nazis, they had been living for the past several months on air and charity in the larger towns of Lithuania.

  Sugihara released his family from the closet, though warning everybody to stay out of sight of the windows, and sat down on his bed to think. Once over the shock of suddenly finding so many of the refugees virtually under his nose, he could easily comprehend why they had come. For a moment, he even wondered how he could ever have imagined that they would do otherwise. Now he had to decide what his answer was going to be to their inevitable request.

  Despite his heavy shoes, Getzel Syrkin's feet were unpleasantly damp from standing in the wet grass half the night. He felt his wife's weight against his shoulder as she dozed on her feet. Last night, traveling on the jerky train from Vilna to Kovno, they had had no sleep. Their arrival had only led to this - standing around waiting for some unknown figure to wake up. Getzel shivered. It was surprisingly chilly for August.

  How strange that it should be August again, he thought, overwhelmed, as he had been for nearly a year, by the rapid pace of events swirling around him. Last August at this time, 1939 it was, he would have been asleep in his own house, in the small town where his father, and grandfather, and who could count how many fathers back from there, had all lived and died. Last August he had thought he too would live in Alexandrov. Then, in September, they had come - the machine men with their machine guns - and he had thought he would at least die in Alexandrov. Well fed, blond, energetic, they seemed so sure that they alone had the right to say who was to live and who to die. It was unbelievable how often they decided the latter. They would shoot a person, just where that person happened to be standing for no reason anyone could see. And then they just left the body where it fell. So a person who had been a relative or a friend or even an enemy, but anyway a known human being, suddenly became just an impediment, an object that one stumbled over in one's haste to obey the Germans' commands.

  "Is anyone cold?" the leader of the Nazi platoon asked when all the Jews they could find had been herded into the market square. Such a simple question. But when you had been goaded out of bed in the middle of the night by a bayonet-wielding teenager and rushed, in just pants and shirt, out into the streets, with people screaming and guns going off all around you, and your children crying, and even your wife unable to do anything about what was happening . . . who knew the answer to even such a simple question at such a time?

  "You must be too cold to speak," the commandant had said. "Let us make a few fires to warm you."

  So they made a few fires. They burned the synagogue and the school. They burned most of the shops, including Getzel's tiny tailoring shop, and some of the houses. Then the commandant made a brief speech, ending with the order that all Jews were to be out of town by 7:00 that morning and any who weren't would be shot.

  Getzel had never been an "outdoors man". His favorite pastime had been to go to the shul, the small synagogue only a few buildings down the street from his tailoring shop. Seated there, across from the man who had been his study partner since childhood, surrounded by other men similarly engaged, he would delve into the precise interpretations of one of the 613 commandments by which observant Jews had organized their lives since the time of Moses. Reasoning, examining, trying to comprehend arguments propounded long ago by rabbis from Mainz to Troyes, Getzel felt fully at home, firmly rooted in the proper time and place, his spirit nourished as much by the familiar routine as by the meaning he found in the Law.

  Suddenly, literally overnight, all that had disappeared: the shul, the old, hand-worn texts, even, he realized as the sun, incomprehensibly, rose, even his life-long study partner, the victim of one of the fires in that terrible night. All the domestic and religious supports that had given Getzel his own particular niche in the world were being destroyed. Nothing remained except his son, thank God, and his wife Cheya who was now quietly snoring against his left shoulder.

  He glanced down at her, thin hair and skin like a half-cooked bagel. He had lived with Cheya for so long he sometimes thought that he no longer really saw her when he looked at her. He had been amazingly fortunate to have her for a wife - a circumstance due, he knew, more to her poor father's inability to make a dowry for the fourth of his daughters than to Getzel's own personal appeal or stature in Alexandrov. A beauty she was not: even when she'd been pregnant with the children they'd lost and the one son that had lived, she had been too thin. But she had a good head for business, and she had sense. It was Cheya who managed the accounts of the poor tailoring business by which Getzel struggled to support his family - and Cheya who coped with the day-to-day problems of their meager existence. Yet she never scorned him for his lack of commercial ability or for the resultant lack of material comfort in their lives. And she always gave him the respect a husband was due.

  But the horror that their life, like the lives of their neighbors, became after September 13, 1939, was incomprehensible even to Cheya. No one knew where to go. Thrown bodily out of the only homes they had ever known, the Jews of Alexandrov joined the Jews of dozens of other little towns, trudging the dirt roads of Poland. Many, fearing the Russians (who were already in control of eastern Poland), more than the Germans, headed for Warsaw. Others, like Getzel and Cheya, with their six-year-old son Dovid, thought only of escaping the unreasoning brutality of the Nazis. Refuge was so far away.
For Getzel, the trek through the mud and rain, and increasing cold as September sank into October, was an unending nightmare, one made worse by having to wake up every morning to another day of it. Terrified of every strange place - and every place was strange - Getzel could only numbly keep putting one foot in front of the other. Totally unprepared by his thirty-eight years to cope with the unfamiliar, Getzel was unable to get his bearings in this overwhelmingly unfamiliar world that stretched out endlessly beyond the borders of his native village. All his attention was concentrated merely on keeping up with the rest of the straggling mass of refugees informally united only by pace and direction. The subconscious realization that half these people also had been shocked into the same state of virtual incapacity made no difference. Getzel Syrkin sank into himself, leaving Cheya almost completely responsible for the needs of the family. Aware and bitterly ashamed of the state he was in, he could nevertheless do nothing about it.

  Fearful or not, they could only keep going. First they crossed German-held Poland, now completely overrun with Nazi soldiers; then through the sector controlled by Russia, where at least they didn't shoot a person just for having been born a Jew; and finally after weeks and weeks, they reached still free Lithuania. Here, at last, a Jew could get help from the Jewish relief societies, just because he had been born a Jew.