Jews Under Japanese Domination, 1939-1945

Gerald David Kearney

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Volume 11, Number

3, Spring 1993, pp. 54-69 (Article)

Published by Purdue University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.1993.0047

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/471158/summary

Access provided at 6 Jan 2020 07:44 GMT from The University Of Texas at Austin, General Libraries
54 SHOFAR Spring 1993 Vol. 11, No.3

JEWS UNDERJAPANESE DOMINATION, 1939-1945

by

Gerald David Kearney

Gerald David Kearney was born in 1960. He graduated

from the University of Alberta with a major in Chinese
language and a minor in Japanese. Under Professor Ehud
Benzui, Mr. Kearney has studied modern Jewish history.
He has also studied at Heilongjiang University in Harbin,
China, formerly Manchukuo, and at Hokkaido University in
Sapporo, Japan.

.Germany has createdfriction with other countries

by her treatment ofJews; Japan wishes to avoid it.
Hachiro Nita
Japanese Foreign Minister
April 1939 Speech I

While the Nazis were embarking on their program of the "Final

Solution" and attempting to coerce the other Axis powers to follow suit,
the Jews under Japanese domination actually received protection. This
paradox was largely due to misinformation about the Jews, translations of
antisemitic works, and the strange beliefs of a handful of highly placed
Japanese Jewish "experts." Because of these strange circumstances the
Japanese initiated policies that were conducive to the survival of the
18,000 Jewish refugees of Shanghai.
To understand the origins of the wartime Japanese policy towards the
Jews it is important to digress on the background of the first Jewish-
Japanese encounters. In 1904, the Japanese government dispatched a
special financial agent to New York to negotiate a loan to finance the war
effort against Czarist Russia. Baron Korekiyo Takahashi failed to secure a

'David Kranzler, japanese Nazis & jews (New York, 1976), p. 234, as quoted injapan
Times of March 1, 1939, and New York Times of December 28, 1939.
Jews Under Japanese Domination 55

loan in either New York or London financial markets. Just prior to his
return to Japan, he attended a dinner and was seated next to a Jewish
financier, Jacob Schiff, German-born president of the New York banking
firm Kuhn, Koeb and Company. Schiff disliked the Czarist treatment of the
Jews. Reportedly, he held Czar Nicholas II personally responsible for the
1903 Kishinev pogroms. Schiff, with the help of M. M. Warburg of
Germany and Sir Ernest Cassel in England, provided the Japanese with a
series of six loans. These loans provided over half the funding of the
Japanese navy and were clearly seen by the Japanese as the reason for the
victory over Russia.
In recognition of his contribution, Jacob Schiff became the first
foreigner to receive the Order of the Rising Sun and was granted a
personal audience with the Emperor. National newspapers devoted page
after page to Schiffs role in the Japanese victory. Baron Takahashi became
the minister of finance and eventually became premier of Japan. He
remained quite good friends with the Schiff family and sent his only
daughter, Wakiko, to live with the Schiffs in New York where she studied
for three years.
Another important influence on Japanese perceptions of Jews came
about during the Bolshevik revolution. In 1919, 75,000 Japanese soldiers
moved into Siberia in cooperation with units of the Allied Armies to assist
remnants of the White Russian forces in their battles with the Bolsheviks.
Among the Japanese were four Russian language experts: General Kiichiro
Higuchi, Colonel Norihiro Yasue, Captain Koreshige Inuzuka, and General
Nobutaka Shioden. These four digested the Russian antisemitic beliefs and
were the major forces in shaping the unique character of the Japanese
antisemitic movement.
From 1935 to 1943, the Japanese antisemites, and in particular
Colonel Yasue and Captain Inuzuka, influenced Japanese Jewish policy.
These men interpreted antisemitic literature such as the Protocols of the
Elders ofZion, but they did not interpret the alleged wealth and power of
the Jews as being necessarily evil. Instead, they decided on a pragmatic
approach to harness this "Jewish power" and use it to Japan's advantage.
The truth of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion seemed self-evident
to the Japanese. The recent collapse of the mighty Hohenzollern,
Hapsburg, and Romanov empires and the role of the Schiff loans seemed
to verifY the ability of Jewish financiers in manipulating world events. The
fierce Chinese resistance to Japanese imperialism could also be seen as
having a Jewish influence. Sun Yat-sen, the father of Chinese nationalism,
had a Jewish bodyguard, Morris Abraham "Two Gun" Cohen. The
Comintern advisor to his Nationalist parry, the Kuomindang, was a Russian
56 SHOFAR Spring 1993 Vol. 11, No.3

named Borodin (his original name was Mikhail Grunzenberg from Latvia).
Sun Yat-sen's own position on the Jews and the question of Zionism was
explicit in his April 24, 1920 letter to N. E. B. Ezra (the editor of Israel
Messenger) :
... all lovers of Democracy cannot help but support wholeheartedly and
welcome with enthusiasm the movement to restore your wonderful and
historic nation, which has contributed so much to the civilization of the
world and which rightly deserves an honorable place in the family of
nations. 2

In 1931 the Japanese took over the three Chinese provinces of

Manchuria and set up a puppet state. The Japanese badly needed invest-
ment capital and technical know-how to develop and exploit the rich
mineral, petroleum, and agricultural resources of their new colony,
Manchukuo, but the efforts to attract foreign investment were largely
unsuccessfu I.
In 1933, Japan's future ally had elected a new chancellor. Three
months after the elections, the Nazis boycotted all Jewish businesses; nine
months after the elections, Jews were barred from positions of authority
in government, professions, and educational institutions.
In 1934, seeing an opportunity to gain both investment and a
workforce of technically skilled people, a leading Japanese iron and steel
industrialist, Gisuke Ayukawa, who had been close friends with Baron
Takahashi and was connected with the Japanese military, broached the
idea of using the Jews to build Manchukuo. He launched his proposal in
a Foreign Ministry Journal article entitled "A Plan to Invite Fifty Thousand
German Jews to Manchukuo." This plan was widely publicized by both
Japanese and Jewish press. Captain Inuzuka gave the plan its unofficial
title, the Fugu Plan, when, during a meeting of the Jewish experts, he
compared the Jewish settlement plan to preparing the Japanese delicacy
Fugu. Fugu is a poisonous pufferfish which if prepared incorrectly is
almost always fatal. Inuzuka cautioned:
... if we can remain ever-alert to the sly nature of the Jews, if we can
continue to devote our constant attention to this enterprise lest the Jews,
in their inherently clever manner, manage to tum the tables on us and
begin to use us for their own ends-if we succeed in our undertaking, we
will create for our nation and our beloved emperor the tastiest and most
nutritious dish imaginable. But, if we make the slightest mistake, it will

2Herman Dicker, Wanderers and Settlers in the Far East, A Century ofjeUlish Life in
China andjapan (New York, 1952), p. 68. See also Kranzler, p. 56.
Jews Under Japanese Domination 57

destroy us in the most horrible manner. 3

As the Japanese saw the situation Fugu was an appropriate metaphor.

Translations of books such as the Protocols and the German book, Juda
entdeckt Amerika (The Jews Discovered America) explained how the
United States and Britain were controlled by the Jews. Bizarre beliefs
abounded, such as how Jews like Jacob Schiff, Otto Kahn, and Paul
Warburg controlled the U.S. Congress, while Bernard Baruch and Henry
Morgenthau, Jr. controlled President Roosevelt as they had President
Wilson. Presumably President Roosevelt would have been easy for the Jews
to control as, according to rumor, his real name had been Rosenfeld.
Antisemites pointed to the Jewish-American dominated movie industry:
people such as Car! Laemmle of Universal Pictures, Adolph Zukor of the
Famous Players, Jesse Lasky of the Feature Players, Samuel Goldwyn, Louis
B. Mayer, etc. The Japanese truly believed Jews controlled eighty percent
of America's capital, the press, and the media. To use a people with such
an alleged broad and concealed power base could be potentially danger-
ous.
During the Five Ministers' Conference of December 5, 1938, the policy
towards the Jews was formalized. The pro-Nazi faction was represented by
General Nobutaka Shioden. Shioden had developed close ties with Nazi
Germany and was a strong advocate of Hitler's Final Solution.
He pointed out that the Russian region which bordered Manchukuo,
Birobidzhan, was established specifically to serve as a homeland for the
Jews. According to him. Birobidzhan showed signs of militaristic activity
and could serve as a staging ground for a Jewish Communist takeover of
Manchukuo and China. Shioden concluded his arguments by urging the
conference ministers to follow the advice and opinion of the Germans
who, after all, were more experienced in Jewish matters.
Shioden was opposed by Finance and Commerce Minister Seihin
Ikeda, the industrialist Gisuke Ayukawa, and foreign minister Hachiro Arita.
Ikeda argued:
... dangerous or not, we need the Jew. By simply welcoming them, we will
gain the affection of the American Jews who control the press, the broadcast
media, the film industry.... We cannot afford to alienate the Jew. If Japan
imitates Germany's severe control of the Jews, discrimination will develop
in connection with our foreign trade. On the other hand, if Japan goes in

3Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz, The Fugu Plan, The Untold Story of thejapanese and
the jews During World War II (New York, 1979), p. 53; see also Kranzler, p. 169, from
Report to Naval General Stall January 18, 1939.
58 SHOFAR Spring 1993 Vol. 11, No.3

the opposite direction and befriends the Jews, entirely new economic
possibilities will open up before us.'

The clique of Itagaki, Ayukawa, Yasue, and Ikeda won, and the Five
Ministers' Conference, motivated by the need for foreign capital, approved
a formal]ewish policy which declared racial equality ofJapanese and Jews.
Even before the policy was formalized in 1938, the Manchukuo faction
of military and industry leaders had begun to reverse the Japanese
indifference to, and sanction of, the treatment of Jews by the White
Russian antisemites in Harbin.
In 1934, the 10,000 Jews living in Harbin were under constant attack
from White Russians who blamed Jews for the success of Communism and
the murder of the Czar. A good example of the Japan<:se attitudes towards
Jews can be seen in the case of Simon Kaspe. Kaspe's father was a rich Jew
who held French citizenship. When his son was kidnapped and held for
ransom, Kaspe appealed to the French consulate for help. This gave the
incident international attention. His son's tortured and mutilated body was
recovered, and the While Russian culprits were brought to justice. They
were sentenced to death by a Chinese court, but the Japanese Chief of
Police, Mr. Eguchi, was a virulent antisemite. He arrested the Chinese
judges and released the convicts. Eguchi praised the kidnappers as patriots
because they had tried to raise funds for anti-Communist organizations.
Eguchi also supported the anti-Jewish White Russian periodical, the
Nashput. The situation reached a climax during the October 7, 1935, Yom
Kippur, when Japanese officials raided the major synagogue of Harbin and
the home of Rabbi Levin looking for arms and banned literature. These
events caused the American Jewish Committee to file a formal protest with
the Japanese ambassador in Washington. This incident was an enormous
embarrassment to proponents of the Fugu Plan.
In 1936 with the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact with the Nazis,
the Japanese embarked on a two-pronged strategy of appeasing both the
Nazis and the Jews. Japanese translations of antisemitic literature as well
as original contributions by the Jewish experts, Yasue, Inuzuka, and
Shioden, reached unprecedented output. Numerous Jewish academics
working in Japan, such as the economist Kurt Singer, were fired from their
jobs. While these attempts to appease the Nazi demands for anti-Jewish
policy were being enacted, the Japanese also pursued an active role to woo
Jewish support.

'Tokayer and Swartz, p. 59.

jews Under japanese Domination 59

The double-sided approach was most apparent in the behavior of the

Japanese antisemites, Colonel Yasue and Captain Inuzuka. Among the
accomplishments of Colonel Yasue, under the pseudonym of Hokoshi,
were translations of many antisemitic books such as the Protocols of the
Elders ofZion; the authorship of antisemitic books such as The Revelation
of a Revolutionary Movement and jewish Control of the World; and
regular contributions to Japanese antisemitic publications such as Kokusai
Seikei Gakkai (Society for International Political and Economic Studies),
Kokusai himitsuryoku no Kenkyu (Studies in the International Conspira-
cy), and Yudaya Kenkyu (Studies on the Jews). A sample of one of his
tracts demonstrates his thoughts on the Jewish people:
Zionism seems to be the goal of the Jews, but they actually want to control
the world's economy, politics and diplomacy.... Almost every state is a
double state, a compound of two opposing nations ... the U.S. Govern-
ment on the surface, and internally a Jewish U.S. Government. Therefore,
we must handle international problems of diplomacy, politics and economy
. from such a twofold viewpoint. 5

This assiduous antisemite also found time from his writings to attend
a military tour of Western countries and to visit Palestine, where he
became personally acquainted with Menachem Ussishkin, Chaim Weizman,
and David Ben-Gurion. He left Palestine with the belief that the emerging
kibbutz concept would later be used by Jews to colonize the countries they
had conquered.
However, the antisemite Yasue lived a double life as an ally of the
Jewish Zionist cause. He dosed down the White Russian antisemitic paper
Nashput, replaced the Harbin police chief,' Eguchi, prevented the letter J
from being stamped on the passports of Beijing Jews, and, between 1937
and 1939, helped organize the Three Conferences ofJewish Communities
in the Far East and form the Far Eastern Jewish Council.
This Council provided autonomous recognition for Russian Jews and
gave them protection against the antisemitic White Russian organizations.
The conferences were widely attended: the first one had over 1,000
delegates and represented five far eastern Jewish communities. The official
organ of the Council was the newspaper Yevreskaya Zhizn (Jewish Life).
The newspaper published pro-Japanese propaganda:
In some papers in Europe, a false rumor had it that the Japanese Goverri-
ment set an anti-Jewish movement afoot. However, such information is

5Kranzler, p. 171.
60 SHOFAR Spring 1993 Vol. 11, No.3

either a mistake or an intrigue. In defense of Japan, we will explain the fact

that on the contrary, the Japanese Government is helping Jews.

Yasue was esteemed by Dr. Abraham Kaufman (the president of the

Far Eastern Jewish Council) as a "true friend of the Jew." In 1941, Yasue
was inscribed in the Golden Book of the Jewish National Fund for his
services to the Jewish People, and in 1950, when he died in a Soviet labor
prison at Khabarovsk, representatives of the Jewish community attended
memorial services in his honor in Tokyo.
Yasue's navy counterpart, Captain Inuzuka, under the pseudonym
Kiyo Utsunomiya, likewise translated and authored many tracts of
antisemitic literature. Among other things, he believed the League of
Nations was a tool of Jewish financiers. The sources of his antisemitic
beliefs were the same as Yasue's, so there is no need to repeat them here.
But, like Yasue, Inuzuka presented a friendly attitude towards the Jews. In
his Shanghai office-he was head of the Bureau of Jewish Affairs-a huge
picture of Theodore Herzl loomed on the wall behind his desk. Inuzuka
was responsible for the Japanese policy which allowed over 1,000 Polish
refugees, including the 500 students of the Mirrer Yeshiva, who were
stranded in Japan with expired visas, to be settled in Shanghai. In
recognition of his services he was given a silver cigarette case inscribed
with the words:
To Captain Inuzuka I.J.N.
In Gratitude and Appreciation for
Your service for the Jewish People
[from the]
Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the U.S.
Frank Newman
Purim 5701 [March 1941]6

The Jews were not the only people confused by Yasue and Inuzuka.
A good example is the Nazi reaction to the October 1940 pro-Jewish Tokyo
radio broadcast of Captain Inuzuka. In his broadcast he contrasted the
Japanese treatment of the Jew with the Nazis' mistreatment. He went on
to say that the Jews were an Asian nation and how natural it was for Japan
to be a protector of all Asian nations. He concluded his remarks: "In our
relations with the Jews, we will always deal with them on the principle of
equality, so long as the Jews remain loyal to the Japanese authorities."7

6Kranz!er, p. 174.

7Kranzler, p. 327, as reported in Shanghai jewish Chronicle.

jews Under japanese Domination 61

Ambassador Eugene Ott of the Nazi embassy reported this broadcast to

Berlin and, in another report, praised the terrific success of an influential
500-page antisemitic work titled The jewish Problem and japan, written
by Kiyo Utsonomiya. The Nazis did not realize they were praising and
condemning the very same man.
Yasue and Inuzuka enlisted the services of Dr. Setsuzo Kotsuji as a
researcher and liaison ,worker. He had published two works on Hebrew
grammar and the Semitic alphabet and was the only Japanese scholar of
Hebrew. When he spoke during the Third Conference ofJewish Communi-
ties in the Far East, it was the first time Jews heard a Japanese official
speak to them in Hebrew, and it had quite a reassuring effect on them.
With the establishment of the Far Eastern Jewish Council and the
work of Inuzuka, Kotsuji, and Yasue, the Japanese succeeded in winning
a measure of trust from the Jewish communities of the Far East. The
second stage of the Fugu Plan, to win trust of the Anlerican Jewry, was
initiated. Yasue, in an October 1938 report, stated his belief that the
American Jewish Congress Convention of November 1939 would acknowl-
edge the hospitable tr~atment of the Japanese government towards theJew
and effectively end the American boycott of Japanese goods.
During this period several influential people in the American Jewish
community were approached by both Japanese and Far Eastern Jewish
representatives. Cyrus Adler, then president of the American Jewish
Committee, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, then president of the American
Jewish Congress, were among the people approached. In particular,
winning the approval of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise was seen as the key to the
success of the Fugu Plan: besides believing Wise to be a confidant of
Roosevelt, the Japanese realized Wise was the most influential Jew in the
American-Jewish community.
Wise was first approached by a Mr. Lew Zikman, a wealthy Manchurian
industrialist and a leader of the Harbin Jewish community. He had been
asked by Dr. Abraham Kaufman to represent the Jews of the Far East at the
American Jewish Congress convention of May 1938, and to submit a report
entitled "The Situation of the Jews in Japan and Manchukuo."
Two weeks before the Japanese Five Ministers' Conference and official
Japanese approval of the pro-Jewish government stance, and just eleven
days after Crystal Night, Rabbi Wise made his opposition to the Japanese
plans clear in a letter to Mr. Zikman:
I write to you again in order to say, I am in complete disagreement with
your position. I think it is wholly vicious for Jews to give support to Japan,
as truly Fascist a nation as Germany or Italy. I do not wish to discuss the
matter any further and I deeply deplore whatever your reasons may be that
62 SHOFAR Spring 1993 Vol. 11, No.3

you are trying to secure support for Japan from Jews. I promise you that
everything I can do to thwart your plans, I will do. You are doing a great
disservice to the Jewish people.
I do not wish to discuss this with you further. I have no desire to speak
with anyone who like you is prepared to give support to Japan for reasons
which are invalid and without regard for the fact that Japan is like Germany,
Italy, a nation that is bound to take an anti-Semitic attitude"and indeed has
already done so.
Faithfully,
Stephen S. Wise
President"

Next, the Japanese attempted a personal and unofficial contact with

Rabbi Wise through an Osaka industrialist, Mitsuzo Tamura. He had
studied twenty years before at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
and he traveled frequently to New York to purchase scrap metal. Among
his business contacts were many Jews. In April of 1939, he enlisted three
of his contacts, Otto Gerson, Ernst Grunebaum, and Franz Hirschland, to
help the Japanese cause. All three men were active in Jewish organizations
including the Joint Distribution Committee. Hirschland was a close friend
of Rabbi Wise, and Hirschland's brother-in-law was on the board of
directors of the World Jewish Congress. The men often met in a office in
the Empire State Building to discuss the Japanese plans for resettlement
of Jews in Manchuria. However, these men were primarily businessmen
and did not represent the Jewish community; therefore, Tamura requested
his Jewish friends to arrange a meeting with Rabbi Wise so that he could
issue an invitation for Wise to visit Japan and see first-hand the beneficent
treatment the Jews were receiving from the Japanese.
In May of 1940 a meeting was finally arranged. Reportedly, Wise met
Tamura as a favor to his friend Hirschland. Rabbi Wise had written several
articles and had given several lectures and sermons on the criminal
aggression of Japan against China. In particular, the infamous "Rape of
Nanking," in which 300,000 Chinese civilians had been brutally slaugh-
tered after the city had surrendered in 1937, steeled Wise's position against
cooperation with Japan. The meeting between the two was not recorded;
however, as Wise's viewpoint on fascist Japan is well known, one can
surmise that Tamura's arguments were wasted on his audience. While
Tamura's meeting with Wise was being held, a barrage of Far Eastern
Jewish support for the Japanese arrived in the offices of the Congress. A
highly respected Sephardi in Shanghai, Ellis Hayim, sent a cable requesting

"Kranzler, p. 228, as reported from letters in Archives of World Jewish Congr~ss.

Jews Under Japanese Domination 63

that Wise accept Tamura's invitation to visit Japan. The Third Conference
of Far Eastern Jewish Communities sent a copy of their confidential
resolution which attested to the kind treatment of both the Jewish refugees
and the Jewish residents by the Japanese.
Tamura also made an approach to the Joint Distribution Committee,
but it seems he had as much success with them as he had with Wise. The
reluctance of the Jewish leaders to have anything to do with the Japanese
was based on two things: most American Jews were super-patriots and
there was a growing belief in the imminence of war with the Japanese (by
1938 the United States had placed an embargo against the export of oil,
metal, and other strategic military supplies to Japan), and in the early
1940s few people realized the existence of Nazi death factories.
A few months after the meeting with Tamura, Rabbi Wise must have
heard something of the functioning of the Nazi concentration camps. At
any rate, something motivated the softening of his animosity towards
fascist Japan. In July 1940, he wrote to a German Jew living in Tokyo, Dr.
Karl Kindermann:
... any offer to settle Jewish refugees in Japan which would come from
authoritative sources in Japan would certainly receive the fullest consider-
ation of Jewish organizations. 9

Unfortunately, at this late date time for negotiations had run out. With
the signing of the Tripartite Pact in September 1940, the Government of
Japan became increasingly pressured by its Nazi allies to adopt more Nazi-
like policies against the Jews. In addition, the Jewish community of
Shanghai, inundated by almost 18,000 German refugees, faced an
economic collapse. They successfully petitioned the Japanese authorities
to restrict further Jewish immigration to Shanghai. Of course, I again
stress, the world had not yet heard of the Nazi atrocities towards the Jews.
The refugees flooding into Shanghai were not all Jewish; sqme were
partly Jewish by blood, as decided by Nuremburg, but were actually
practicing Christians. Some were homosexual or political opponents of
Hitler's regime. Half of the refugees were between 31 and 50 years of age,
and one-third were 50 years old or more. They usually arrived destitute
and were often used as strike breakers. Sometimes they would even work
for nothing in the hopes of eventually replacing the lower-class Russian or
Chinese employees. This caused a rise in antisemitism among the non-
Jewish residents. /

9Dicker, p. 57. See also, Tokayer and Swartz, p. 78.

 64 SHOFAR Spring 1993 Vol. 11, No.3

The influx of the refugees also exacerbated deep divisions in the

Shanghai Jewish community between the affluent Sephardi Baghdadi
community which had arrived in Shanghai almost 100 years before, and
the larger Ashkenazi community made of "ex-soldiers, escapees from
Siberia, political, exiles, and adventurers." Their chief occupations were
reported to be dope peddling, white slavery, and barkeeping. The Sephardi
. regarded them as "Schnorrers." The problems in relations between the
communities persisted throughout the war. Towards the end of the war,
when large numbers of Jews were suffering from malnutrition, seven
Jewish women were driven by hunger to become registered prostitutes,
and twenty mothers sold their babies, this was particularly obvious. In the
midst of this incredible hardship the Ashkenazi kitchen fund, which
supported 11,000 refugees in 1942, rejected food provided by the Joint
American Distribution Committee as inedible. The Joint's representatives
in Shanghai, Laura Margolies and Manuel Siegel, reported that "greater
harm was inflicted on their cause by internal and intergroup dissension
than by Japanese regulations. ,,10
In late 1939, two leaders from the Jewish community, Sir Victor
Sassoon and Ellis Hayim, met with Yasue, Inuzuka, and Consul Shiro
Ishiguro, from the ministry of foreign affairs, and assured the Japanese
that, for the most part, the Jews would not oppose restrictions since they
would be for the good of those already in Shanghai. The Japanese
authorities then restricted immigration of refugees to whoever could
produce $400 US guarantee money. Jews not able to produce the money
were not allowed a transit visa.
Some immigration did, however, still occur under the sanction and
protection of the Japanese government. The most notable example of this
happened in Kovno, Lithuania. In early 1940, a Japanese consul, Senpo
Sugihara, suddenly appeared in the city of Kovno. He was called "the angel
of salvation" by the Mirrer Yeshiva. Sugihara issued over 3,500 Japanese
transit visas. Zorach Wahrhaftig, later to become the Minister of Religion
in Israel, persuaded the entire faculty and students of Mirrer Yeshiva to go
to Japan. This action resulted in the Mirrer Yeshiva's being the only
complete Yeshiva in Europe to survive the Nazi onslaught. The Russians
allowed Jews holding these visas passage to Vladivostok, where they
shipped aboard a Japanese boat, and on a seven- or fourteen-day tourist
visa, entered Japan. In this way, two thousand Jews were able to escape to

l°Kranzler, p. 466, as reported in Margolies, Report, p. 18, and Siegel, Report, August 26,
1945, p. 1.
Jews Under Japanese Domination 65

Japan. The majority of these refugees were not able to find another
country to accept them, so the Japanese authorities extended their tourist
visas up to eight months. After those visas expired the Jews were deported
to Shanghai.
The arrival of so many Jews wearing caftans and long curled sideburns
surprised the Japanese. The somewhat humorous incidents that arose from
this clash of cultures were almost immediate. The first group of rabbinical
students and rabbis arrived on a Friday after sundown, and they refused
to violate the Sabbath by signing the required landing papers. The Jewish
representative from Kobe, Mr. Gerhard Gerechter, had a difficult time
trying to convince the rabbis to sign and an even more difficult time trying
to explain the refugees' refusal at such a simple request to the mystified
Japanese authorities. Finally the problem was resolved when Gerechter
signed the word Sbabbos on each of the refugees' papers in place of their
names.
Many of the Jews had difficulty adapting to their new surroundings.
A story in a Japanese newspaper, commenting on events in one of the
Kobe communal bath houses, complained that Jews seemed to be doing
more staring than bathing; reportedly, the Jews didn't even get wet.
Communal bathing between the sexes, a common Japanese practice,
shocked the orthodox Jews.
Two Yeshiva students who climbed to the roof of an eight-story
department store, strapped on their phylacteries, and began their morning
prayers, were arrested by police who believed the small leather boxes
contained a radio transmitter and a camera. Only the smooth talk of a
representative from the Jewish community and the dissection of the
phylacteries saved the two students from being charged with military
espionage.
In Kobe the Jews were well fed and taken care of. Besides the large
amounts of Jewish relief funding, this was largely because of gifts of food
and clothing from a heterodox Japanese Christian sect called the Holiness
Church that was under the leadership of an excommunicated bishop, Juji
Nakadawas, and was based in Kobe. This sect believed that the Japanese
are descendants of the ten lost tribes and cited the common aspects of the
Shinto religion and Judaism as proof of this theory. As part of its ritual the
church prayed three times a day for the return to Zion.
After Pearl Harbor and the impressive victories of the Nazis the
Japanese began to swing towards alliance with the Nazi Jewish policy.
Colonel Yasue and Captain Inuzaka were reassigned duties. The then
Foreign Affairs officer, Yosuke Matsuoka, who had been a big supporter of
the Fugu Plan, was forced to resign. In mid-1942, Inuzuka's position as
66 SHOFAR Spring 1993 Vol. 11, No.3

head ofJewish affairs was taken over by an indifferent bureaucrat, Captain

Saneyoshi. Also in 1942, the rabid antisemite, Lt. General Nobutaka
Shioden, with support from the German embassy, won a seat in the
Japanese diet. These changes resulted in a ghetto's being set up in
Shanghai on February 18, 1943. All Jews who had arrived in Shanghai after.
1937 were given until May 18 to relocate into the poor Chinese area of
Kongkew. Meanwhile, in Japan, huge antisemitic exhibitions sponsored by
the German Embassy and held in Tokyo drew in an audience of over a
million Japanese.
The swing to Nazi antisemitism reached its zenith with the arrival in
Shanghai of the Gestapo chief, Colonel Josef Meisinger. Meisinger had
been chiefof the secret police in Warsaw in 1939 and had been responsi-
ble for killing an estimated one hundred thousand Jews. He was called the
"Butcher of Warsaw." Meisinger was accompanied by Adolph Puttkamer,
the chief of the German Information Bureau, and Hans Neumann, who
had gained his expertise at Bergen-Belsen. They presented a series of plans
for the consideration oftheJapanese officials. One of the plans was simply
to load the Jews aboard one of the several unseaworthy ships moored in
the Whangpoo River, tow the ship out to sea, and sink it. Another proposal
was to use the Jews as slave labor in a salt mine upriver from Shanghai.
Reportedly, neither plan appealed to Meisinger. His suggested project was
the construction of a concentration camp on the island of Tsungming in
the mouth of the Yangtze, where Jews could be subjected to scientific
experiments like those the Japanese were already doing to the Chinese at
the biological research station in Harbin, know by the name 731. The Nazis
suggested the best time for implementing one of these plans would be
during the upcoming Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah. At that time, they
reasoned, Jews would be in their synagogues, which would simplify the
process of rounding them up.
Amongst the Japanese officials attending the meeting was the vice-
consul of the Japanese Consulate, Mitsugi Shibata. According to my sources
he was not affiliated with the proponents of the Fugu Plan. Humanitarian
motives seemed to be the force which compelled him to act as a traitor to
his government and inform the leaders of the Jewish community of the
Nazi plan.
The Jewish leaders, Sephardi (Ellis Hayim and Michael Speelman),
Ashkenaki (Boris Topaz, Joseph Bitker), and German (Dr. Kardegg, Fritz
Kaufmann, and Robert Peritz), came together to discuss what the Jewish
response to this threat would be. So as not to cause panic in the communi-
ty, they decided to keep the Nazi plans secret. In order to avoid the
telegraph censors, they sent out a Chinese messenger to Dr. Abraham
Jews Under Japanese Domination 67

Kaufman in Harbin. Kaufman informed Colonel Yasue, who although

assigned other duties was still in China and still had a powerful voice in
army affairs. Kaufman also got word of the impending holocaust to Tokyo
and the attention of Yosuke Matsuoka, the former Minister of Foreign
Affairs. Both men, although deprived of official office, still seemed to have
influence in the affairs of the government. On the home front, the Jewish
leaders sent a Jew, Dr. Abraham Cohn, to meet with Tsutomu Kubota, the
director of refugee affairs. Cohn had grown up in Nagasaki and had earned
his medical degree at a Japanese university. Japanese was his first language.
The refugees mistrusted Cohn because he appeared more Japanese than
Jewish, but they were desperate. Cohn even believed in the common
origin theory of the Holiness Church movement.'
Dr. Abraham Cohn's meetings with Kubota or the behind-the-scenes
intervention ofYasue or Matsuoka must have had an effect: for the Jewish
population, Rosh Hashanah came and went, uneventfully. However, the
eight leaders of the Jewish community were sent to prison for a varying
period of a 'few days to, in the case of Topaz, six months. While in prison
they witnessed the torture of the former vice-consul, Shibata. After a long
imprisonment, he was dismissed from the consular service and sent back
to Japan. At the end of the war the Jews remembered the kindness of
Shibata, and a number of them gathered money to send to him as a
gesture of gratitude.
The near catastrophe was prevented from recurring by'the issuing of
a memo from the Foreign Minister, Shigenori Togo-Matsuoka's successor.
The memo was titled "Emergency Measures for Jewish People," and it
contained the important directive: "Nothing shall be done to or with the
Jews that might inspire enemy counterpropaganda." 11
'As the war progressed, the Axis power began to retreat all over
Europe and North Africa, the Japanese were being forced to retreat from
the interior of China by Chiang Kaishek's Nationalists and Mao's Commu-
nists, and the Americans had begun steadily island-hopping towards Japan.
The war had clearly turned against the Japanese.
Dr. Karl Kindermann, the earlier recipient of letters from Rabbi Wise,
was summoned by one of Prime Minister Tojo's advisers, Colonel Tsugio
Sekiguchi. He told Kindermann thft the Japanese were ready for a
compromise and that they had tried various ways to contaCt Washington,
but they had been refused contact. Sekiguchi then requested the doctor to
journey to Dairen to meet Admiral Nakamura. Nakamura offered to move

"Tokayer and Swartz, p. 233.

68 SHOFAR Spring 1993 Vol. 11, No.3

the Shanghai Jews out of the ghetto and into a Jewish state in Manchukuo.
He hoped the American Jewish community when they realized the sincerity
of the Japanese would persuade Roosevelt to come to the peace table. It
was the rebirth of the old Fugu Plan. Kindermann wrote to Rabbi Wise and
told him of the Japanese deal. Wise was not interested and replied: "The
Jewish Congress in America will not enter any negotiations with Japan
without the consent of the State Department." 12
A second, lower level, peace feeler is recorded as having taken place
in the Chinese-Jewish community of Tientsin. Colonel Tomiaki Hidaka
asked the leader of the community, Zelig Belokamen, to inform the Jewish
Americans of the good treatment Jews had received under Japanese rule
and to influence the Jewish president, Roosevelt, and his top Jewish
advisors to end the war.
The Japanese belief in international Jewish influence was still
undiminished. Tragically, for the Jewish residents of the ghetto, this belief
was one of the factors that influenced the decision to. build a radio
transmitter and to store ammunition in the ghetto. On July 17, 1945,
attempting to destroy the transmitter, American B-52s bombed the ghetto;
700 homes were destroyed, 250 Jews were wounded, and 31 were killed.
Less than a month later, on August the fifteenth, the Hiroshima bomb
signalled the beginning of the end.
After the war most Jews immigrated to Israel or America. Among the
immigrants were W. Michael Blumenthal, who eventually became President
Carter's secretary of the Treasury, and Joseph Tekoah (Tukaczynski), who
became Israel's representative at the United Nations.
Captain Inuzuka was arrested in the Philippines as a war criminal,
whereupon he produced the cigarette case given to him by the Orthodox
Rabbis as proof of his assistance of non-Japanese. In Tokyo, he founded
the Nippon-Israel Friendship League and was an active member until, in
the' mid 1950s, a researcher, Michael Kogan, confronted him with the
evidence of his antisemitic past. The Hebrew scholar, Setsuzo Kotsuji,
traveled to Israel in 1959, and at the age of sixty converted to Judaism.
Gisuke Aykawa, the originator of the Fugu Plan, became an important
member of the Japanese Diet and a personal adviser to the Prime Minister.
The Nazi, Meisinger, was arrested in Japan and hanged in 1946. The Mirrer
Yeshiva established itself in Brooklyn, U.S.A. In 1976, Mitsugi Shibata, who
had saved the lives of thousands ofJews, was honored at a Passover seder
at the Jewish Community Center in Tokyo. Senpo Sugihara, the consul

12Tokayer and Swartz, p. 258.

jews Under japanese Domination 69

who had issued 3,500 transit visas in Lithuania, was officially acknowledged
by the State of Israel.
The history of the 30,000 Jews under Japanese domination during
World War II may be seen as insignificant. The horrors of the Nazi
Holocaust dwarf the hardships that his small community endured. Yet I
believe this much-neglected area of history deserves to be studied more.
The transmission of a European prejudice across cultural barriers and the
resulting filtering and re-interpretation of this prejudice into a form
understandable by the Japanese people is, in itself, an interesting study.
There is no question, fascist Japan was capable of the same kind of
brutality as the Nazis: the biological experiments conducted on Chinese in
Harbin and the numerous incidents of slaughtering of civilians prove this.
Ironically, the misinformation supplied by the Japanese antisemites caused
the Japanese to protect and even assist the Jews.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dicker, H. Wanderers and Settlers in the Far East, A Century ofjewish

Life in China andjapan. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1962.
Kranzler, D. japanese, Nazis & jews. New York Yeshiva University Press,
1976.
Spence, J. D. 1be Search for Modern China. New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1990.
Tokayer, M. and M. Swartz. 1be Fugu Plan. New York: Paddington Press,
1979.