Researchers say Japan exaggerated the story of 'Japanese Schindler' Chiune Sugihara

Aug 02, 2023 | News On Japan

In recent years, the Lithuania-based diplomat who issued thousands of visas to Jews became a household name – but is his lionization part of a familiar post-Holocaust phenomenon?

YAOTSU, Aug 02, 2023 (timesofisrael.com) - Three years before the Olympics began in 2021, Tokyo was already developing the national image it would display as the world looked on.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education issued a handout to the city’s public schools in 2018 highlighting “the outstanding achievements of our predecessors” that were meant to “raise [students’] self-awareness and pride as Japanese.”

Occupying a majority of the four-page handout was the story of diplomat Chiune Sugihara, who wrote thousands of life-saving visas for Jews fleeing Europe in 1940. The pamphlet recreates a dramatized version of Sugihara’s life and actions, bolstered by quotes from nameless descendants of the Jewish refugees he saved.

Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat to Lithuania from 1939 to 1940, helped thousands of Jewish refugees flee wartime Europe by issuing transit visas that allowed them to travel across the Soviet Union to Japan. Today, his name and story can be found all over the country, from his supposed hometown in Yaotsu to a museum at the northern Tsuruga port where Jewish refugees landed. ...continue reading

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