#sempo sugihara

[david-goldrock]

Righteous Among the Nations Chiune (Sempo) Sugihara street

Japan's consol in Lithuania in WW2

Rescued thousands of jews by giving visas to Jews asking to leave Lithuania

[rickchung]

Courage Now x Firehall Arts Centre x Railtown. (via Youn Park)

Vancouver-based playwright/actress Manami Hara stars in her own remarkable dramatic stage play directed by Amiel Gladstone. Her intertwined script weaves dual timelines from the past to relate the true story of one Japanese diplomat’s tireless bravery, Vice-Consul Chiune “Sempo” Sugihara (aka “the Japanese Schindler”), in saving some six-thousand Jewish lives fleeing Nazi oppression in WWII-era Lithuania.

At its core, Courage Now is told as a ghost story through memories dramatized in traumatic flashbacks balancing the sacrifices of history and their ripples through time into the lives of generational descendants. Sugihara (Ryota Kaneko) as a character is a phantom in the lives of his widow, Yukiko (Hara), and a young “Sugihara Jew”, only a child (Katherine Matlashewski) when she fled, who later visits Japan as an adult (Advah Soudack) to learn more about her past. It’s a powerful historical retelling expressed creatively to heighten its heartbreakingly real drama.

Cast: (left to right) Matlashewski, Kaneko, and Hara.

Running live on stage now until Dec. 4.

[thelastdivide]

The Prince of Judah and the Vice-Consul of Japan

In December 1939, an eleven-year-old Jewish boy named Solly Ganor invited a stranger to his family’s Hanukkah celebration at their home in Kaunas, Lithuania– then the capital city. Solly had gone into a little shop owned by his aunt to borrow a couple of coins to see the newest Laurel and Hardy movie. He found his aunt deep in conversation, speaking Russian with a tall, elegantly dressed Japanese man– the first Asian person Solly had ever seen. His aunt introduced him formally as “His Excellency Chiune Sugihara, the Vice-Consul from Japan.” Solly would have been intimidated, but he felt an aura of kindliness around the stranger. He shook hands with Sugihara and then told his aunt he wanted to go to the movies. Before she could move, Sugihara had pulled out his coin purse and given Solly the money. Solly, a little confused but grateful, responded in kind. He invited Sugihara to their Hanukkah dinner. His aunt was embarrassed and assured the diplomat he was under no obligation to attend. But Sugihara cut her off. “Actually,” he said, “I’d love to.”

It was in one of the darkest winters in human history that Chiune Sugihara joined his Jewish neighbors to hear and celebrate the Festival of Lights’ ancient message of hope and perseverance against all odds, a message that Sugihara needed as much as any of them. Just two months prior, the Nazis had invaded Poland. The large and thriving Jewish community in Kaunas had followed Hitler’s rise closely and listened to his hateful rhetoric on the radio, but they assumed that the worst of the rumors were exaggerated, and the Nazi threat would blow over quickly. Now, thousands upon thousands of Polish Jewish refugees were flooding over the western border into Lithuania, bringing with them reports of atrocities too terrible to imagine. Ghettos in the cities. Pogroms in the villages. Wholesale slaughter of their friends, neighbors, and families. Most had escaped with little or nothing, and the Jewish community of Kaunas was stretching its resources to the limit to take them in. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had occupied tiny Lithuania and dissolved its government, building up its “buffer strip” against the inevitable German advance. It wasn’t a matter of if the war would come to Kaunas, but when. By the summer of 1940, all but two foreign diplomats had been evacuated from the city, leaving only Sugihara and a middle-manager from the Phillips corporation who had been made temporary consul for the Netherlands.

By this time, the Jewish refugees in Lithuania and elsewhere had applied to nearly every country in the free world– including the United States– but all had stopped or severely restricted their acceptance of refugees. To our everlasting shame, we ignored the cry of the helpless and turned our backs on the needy. In March 1939, a Congressional bill that would have allowed 20,000 German Jewish children to immigrate was allowed to die in committee. This was just a few months after Kristallnacht; there was no secret about the threat to Jews who remained in Germany. But we had strict immigration quotas to maintain. In June 1939, 907 Jewish refugees aboard the German transatlantic liner St. Louis made it all the way to Miami harbor, only to be sent back to Europe, where nearly a third of them were murdered in the Holocaust. An executive order could have permitted their entry into the U.S., but 83% of the public was against it, and President Roosevelt had a third term to win. Everyone from the FBI to FDR invoked “national security,” suggesting it was possible– likely, even– that some of the ship’s passengers were Nazi spies masquerading as refugees.

With so much of the western world under Nazi control or turning a blind eye, the two diplomats left in Kaunas had a full-blown refugee crisis on their hands. Lithuania’s Baltic ports were blockaded. The only safe escape route was eastward across Russia to Japan, from whence they could safely sail to resettlement. But the Soviet officials refused to let the refugees cross Russia without visas approved by the Japanese government.

So it was that Chiune Sugihara and his family woke up one morning to find a crowd of hundreds outside their door, begging for assistance with this last-ditch escape effort. Sugihara wired his superiors in Tokyo three times. He got three ambiguous refusals. They told him to stop asking. Sugihara was left alone, with the fate of thousands in his hands.

A story: According to a classic midrash, when the Israelites arrived at the shores of the sea after their exodus from slavery in Egypt, the waters didn’t immediately part for them. Actually, no one knew what would happen. With the open ocean ahead and Pharaoh’s army behind, they were trapped. An argument broke out. Some said, “We should surrender. Better to go back into slavery than for all of us to be killed.” Others said, “We should fight. If we’re going to die, we’ll die free.” Even Moses, the fearless miracle worker, was at a loss. The people turned on him. “Have you brought us all the way out here only to die?” they asked. He turned aside from the group and went up on a little hill to pray.

Amid all this, a man named Nachshon stepped forward. He was a prince from the tribe of Judah, a leader. But on this occasion he said nothing. He simply walked, directly into the sea, and began to sing praises to God. The water came up to his knees and soaked his robes. It rose to his waist, then to his chest. The waves washed over his head, but he could still be heard, singing clearly between the swells. Finally, he slipped under and was heard no more. The whole congregation of Israel fell silent. It was then that God turned to Moses and said, “Look! My child, my beloved, is drowning in the sea, and you’re standing here praying? I gave you the power to perform miracles. I gave you your staff. Use it!”

And Moses lifted his staff. The waters of the sea parted, and Nachshon led the way to freedom.

Chiune Sugihara was a career diplomat and a man of strict discipline. He had a family to provide for. He knew that if he acted outside of his orders he risked firing and disgrace. But he later recalled being haunted by a Japanese proverb: “Even a hunter cannot kill the bird that flies to him for refuge.” Refugees were begging at his door, even kneeling to kiss his shoes. “The people in Tokyo were not united,” he said later. “I felt it silly to deal with them. So, I made up my mind not to wait for their reply.” The visas would be written.

For the next 30 days Sugihara and his wife, Yukiko, worked 18 to 20 hours a day, until their hands were raw and aching and they were nearly collapsing of exhaustion. They produced upwards of 300 visas– what would typically be a month’s workload– every day. Solly Ganor recalled seeing his friend Sugihara in the last days of his monumental effort– the dignified, elegant vice-consul standing outside in his shirtsleeves, haggard, eyes bloodshot, handing out visas. According to some eyewitnesses he was still writing visas and throwing them out of the train’s windows when he and his family were finally forced to evacuate.

Chiune Sugihara saved over 6,000 Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. It’s estimated that there are over 45,000 people alive today– their descendants– who would not exist had it not been for a mild-mannered diplomat’s extraordinary courage and fidelity to his own conscience. The Talmud tells us, “Whoever saves one life, saves an entire world.” As he expected, Sugihara was fired from the Japanese diplomatic service after the war. He spent the rest of his career working as a translator for various private companies. Ever humble, he did not talk about his heroic deeds. His own neighbors had no idea what he’d done until his death in 1986, when a massive Jewish delegation-- including the Israeli ambassador to Japan-- showed up at his funeral.

Solly Ganor, incidentally, was unable to escape Lithuania and ended up in Dachau concentration camp, where he survived to the end of the war. Ironically, the camp was liberated by a battalion of Japanese-American soldiers– men whose families were interned in their own country.

Since the issuance of last Friday’s abominable executive order I have seen a million and a half moralisms about welcoming the stranger, helping the helpless, and refusing to fear difference. These are indispensable values, foundational to the maintenance of an open and healthy society, and they bear endless repetition.

But that’s not what I want to say here. We already know the ban is wrong. We already know that “national security” is a false flag for the workings of hatred and greed. We already condemn the culture of fear that has turned so much of our country against its own principles– although we can never condemn it loudly enough. But what we need to have constantly before us, now more than ever, is the example of people like Chiune Sugihara. People like Nachshon. People who know that God and public opinion will follow a true act of conscience, not vice versa.

Someday long in the future the descendants of Syrian refugees will not thank us for our political memes or our late-night comedy bits or our private exasperation. They won’t thank us for impotent prayers of the mind without acts of the body and heart. They won’t thank me for writing this.

But they will thank us for our deeds. They will thank us for hounding the authorities, no matter how many times we’re rejected, and defying them if they fail us. They will thank us for protecting our immigrant neighbors, for meeting injustice with ferocious and creative resistance, for showing up, for hitting the streets, for donating, for volunteering, for putting all our strength of arm and heart and brain into every task, no matter how small, that our lives demand of us in the struggle to heal our broken world. There is no such thing as an insignificant action or an insignificant life. You don’t have to be a diplomat. You don’t have to be an immigration lawyer. You don’t have to be the Prince of Judah or the Vice-Consul of Japan. All that is asked of you is to live the life before you, and live it well, with open eyes, a courageous spirit, and an undivided heart. Don’t wait for anyone, human or divine, to light the fire of justice. Your deeds are both the spark and the smoke.

The great second-century Jewish sage Rabbi Tarfon would say, “We are not obligated to complete the task before us, but neither are we free to abandon it.” Do not be daunted by the magnitude of human suffering. Start where you are. Start now.

Sources:

"An Interview with Solly Ganor, September 1998." Interview by Diane Estelle Vicari. Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness. WGBH/PBS, n.d. Web.<http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/sugihara/readings/ganor.html>

"Chiune Sugihara." The Jewish Virtual Library. American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, n.d. Web. 01 Feb. 2017. <http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/chiune-sugihara>.

"Chiune (Sempo) Sugihara." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, n.d. Web. 01 Feb. 2017 <https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005594>.

"Voyage of the St. Louis." United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, n.d. Web. 01 Feb. 2017 <https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267>

[eupraxsophy]

The Japanese Diplomat Who Saved Thousands of Jews

The Japanese Diplomat Who Saved Thousands of Jews

Chiune “Sempo” Sugihara was a Japanese government official who, as vice consul of Japan in Lithuania, helped over 6,000 Jews flee certain death during WWII, risking his career and his life. Hundreds of Jewish refugees arrived in Sugihara’s consulate, trying to get a visa to travel to Japan. Unsurprisingly, the Japanese Empire had very strict immigration procedures, requiring applicants to pay…

[sixpenceee]

Chiune Sugihara, also called Sempo Sugihara was a Japanese government official who served as vice consul for the Japanese Empire in Lithuania. During the Second World War, Sugihara helped thousands of Jews flee Europe by issuing transit visas to them so that they could travel through Japanese territory, risking his job and his family's lives. The fleeing Jews were refugees from German-occupied Western Poland and Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland, as well as residents of Lithuania. A few decades after the war, in 1985, the State of Israel honored Sugihara as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. (Source)

[manprtectingtheearth]

・杉原千畝・Chiune Sugihara・Sempo Sugihara・命のビザ 二次世界大戦中、ナチス・ドイツなど世界中からの迫害から逃げていたユダヤ人難民に、日本を通過させるビザを発給した男である。約六千人の命が助かったのではないかと言われています。彼は後に、「東洋のシンドラー(Schindler of the East)」（シンドラーとはドイツ生まれの実業家。ユダヤ人を自身の会社で雇用し、迫害から救った男でる）と呼ばれるようになります。彼は、外務省の本省に日本への通過ビザ発給の許可をかけ合いますが、本省の許可はおりませんでした。彼は人道上拒否出来ないと自信で決断し、外務省を首になっても構わないと思い、条件をつけず迫害され、日本にきたすべてのユダヤ人に通過ビザ（命のビザ）の発給を行いました。世界には杉原千畝以外にも世界中から迫害されているユダヤ人を救った人道主義の人達がいます。彼ら（人道を大事にする人達）は危険を冒してまで国境や人種を超え同じ対等な人間として自身の信じる勇気と正義を貫きました。

[darksacredlight]

Chiune “Sempo” (Pavlo Sergeyevitch) Sugihara, a Russian Orthodox convert & Japanese diplomat who saved over 6,000 Jewish people’s lives during the Holocaust by writing unauthorized visas. More here.

This icon was written by Svetlana Vukmirović.

[beckylower]

The Japanese Schindler

Given the history of Japanese atrocities in the 1930’s in Manchuria and during World War II in Korea, the Philippines, and other locations, it would be easy to see all Japanese of that era as either willing participants in or giving tacit approval to the brutality, but heroes are sometimes found in the most unexpected places. Such is the case with the subject of today’s post, Chiune (Sempo)…

[jadedanddark]

Quiet

One of the nicest compliments I’ve ever been given was the phrase “quietly competent.”  It was said by my martial arts instructor, who was at the time marveling at how little I complained in spite of having been given one of the most arduous tasks to do for a whole hour, namely assist one of the near-black belts in practicing the kata, which meant I was going to be thrown, over and over, forbidden to make a sound in spite of the relief it would lend me. An hour later, he said those words over me, and I felt like I could perform kata for days. It made me think about heroes.  A lot of the ones you hear the most about are the loud type, the ones that run headfirst into danger and come out only to do it again, but I think we forget about the quiet ones.  They’re just as important, just as brave, but ever, ever so soft and silent.  Here’s a few of the ones I love the most.

Dr. John Snow Anyone thinking this is about Game of Thrones may excuse themselves, because this person was not only real, but a hero.  London, 1854, saw one of the most lethal outbreaks of cholera in European history, past or present, and it had neither a cure nor a discernible method of spreading.  It scared a lot of people; until that time, disease had been thought of as just something that happened to poor people, but cholera made no distinction between the classes, and that little fact upset a lot of world views.  Dr. Snow tried to find a pattern, by mapping out the city and placing a dot wherever there had been a cholera death.  One spot stood out: a wealthy woman who lived far away from Broad Street (ground zero for the outbreak), but who had died anyway.  It turned out that she had been having her drinking water specially transported from Broad Street to her house (it was a natural soda deposit, and the bubbles were trendy).  Snow discovered that cholera was spread by contaminated water, broke the handle off the Broad Street pump, and the world changed.  Regulations were put on the sewage and water systems, those who already had the disease could now have a chance of survival (the cure is clean water), and the medical world now knew that water was a means of disease spread.

Chiune “Sempo” Sugihara During WWII, Japan was a German ally, but not everyone who lived in Japan was sympathetic to the Nazi rule.  Among that number was a diplomat, a man capable of writing transit visas and with enough authority that he would not be questioned if he wrote several of them.  Say...forty thousand.  Sugihara helped that many people, mostly Jewish families, cross into Japanese territories where they would be better able to find their way onward.  He had the nickname “Sempo” due to an alternate pronouncing of his name characters, and it was easier for Westerners to pronounce.  After the war, he was given a pile of recognition from various countries for his work, which had it gone wrong, would have resulted in his and his family’s executions.

Nellie Bly (real name Elizabeth Chochrane) Bly was a rare character during 1880′s America.  In addition to being a female journalist, she at one time held the world record for fastest circumnavigation of the globe (72 days) and is credited with the invention of the stacking garbage can.  She was also, and this is the really important part, a journalist. In 1887, the state of the American asylum institution was a shameful, dirty creature.  Bly checked herself into one of these facilities with the intention of reporting an expose on the conditions within, but had no idea the extent to which those conditions had sunk.  The perfectly sane Bly was tied to a bench with twenty other inmates in their own filth, tortured with ice water, and beaten if she made any noise in the process.  When she left ten days later, already halfway into genuine madness, her fiery articles caused the standard of such institutions to fall under harsh scrutiny, and a governmental position was quickly formed to ensure that the tortures she brought to light would never happen again.

There are more.  There are more than I could ever name, and I want to cry when I think of them.  It’s one thing to be like Lyudmila Pavlichenko, and have over 300 sniper kills to her name, or Dr. Marting Luther King Jr., and everything he eventually gave for his cause, and to be a quiet hero. You change the world, but you pay for it in being forgotten.  That’s a quiet martyrdom, I think.  It’s fitting, though unfair as hell. I’m nowhere near as brave as these people.  But I can try.

[ringlawfirm]

Google Honors Japanese Diplomat Who Saved Jews during Holocaust | The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com | Aryeh Savir, Tazpit News Agency | 27 Tammuz 5779 – July 29, 2019 | JewishPress.com

Google Honors Japanese Diplomat Who Saved Jews during Holocaust | The Jewish Press – JewishPress.com | Aryeh Savir, Tazpit News Agency | 27 Tammuz 5779 – July 29, 2019 | JewishPress.com

Chiune Sempo Sugihara issued between 2,100 and 3,500 transit visas and saved some 6,000 Jews, papers which later came to be known as “visas for life.”

Source: Google Honors Japanese Diplomat Who Saved Jews during Holocaust | The Jewish Press – JewishPress.com | Aryeh Savir, Tazpit News Agency | 27 Tammuz 5779 – July 29, 2019 | JewishPress.com

[eupraxsophy]

The Japanese Diplomat who Saved Thousands from the Nazis

The Japanese Diplomat who Saved Thousands from the Nazis

On this day in 1940, Japanese diplomat Chiune “Sempo” Sugihara and his Yukio began helping write and issue visas to help Jews flee certain death in the Second World War.

As Japan’s vice consul in Lithuania, Sugihara risked his career and his life to help the hundreds of Jewish refugees that came to his consulate desperately seeking a visa to travel to Japan. Unsurprisingly, the…

[mytraceyblodget]

Honoring a righteous among the nations from the land of the rising sun

The Chamber of the Holocaust Museum, Israel's first Holocaust museum, will honor Japanese diplomat Chiune Sempo Sugihara who rescued Jews during WWII. Honoring a righteous among the nations from the land of the rising sun published first on https://medium.com/@Sex777

[on-edi-r-e-ct-io-n]

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Chiune Sugihara. This man saved 6000 Jews. He was a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania. When the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Sugihara risked his life to start issuing unlawful travel visas to Jews. He hand-wrote them 18 hrs a day. The day his consulate closed and he had to evacuate, witnesses claim he was STILL writing visas and throwing from the train as he pulled away. He saved 6000 lives. The world didn’t know what he’d done until Israel honored him in 1985, the year before he died.

[o-ne-di-r-e-cti-o-n]

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Chiune Sugihara. This man saved 6000 Jews. He was a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania. When the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Sugihara risked his life to start issuing unlawful travel visas to Jews. He hand-wrote them 18 hrs a day. The day his consulate closed and he had to evacuate, witnesses claim he was STILL writing visas and throwing from the train as he pulled away. He saved 6000 lives. The world didn’t know what he’d done until Israel honored him in 1985, the year before he died.