In 1939, Sugihara became a vice-consul of the Japanese Consulate in
Kaunas, the
temporary capital of Lithuania. His duties included reporting on Soviet and German troop movements, Sugihara had cooperated with
Polish intelligence as part of a bigger
Japanese–Polish cooperative plan. In Lithuania, Sugihara started using the
Sino-Japanese reading "Sempo" for his given name, since it was easier to pronounce than "Chiune".
Jewish refugees As the
Soviet Union occupied sovereign Lithuania in 1940, many
Polish and
Lithuanian Jews fearing persecution tried to acquire
exit visas. While under Soviet occupation, it was announced that many foreign consulates in Kaunas would soon be closed. Per the Holocaust researcher and historian
David Kranzler, Dutch national, Nathan Gutwirth asked the Dutch Ambassador to the Baltic states, L. P. J. de Dekker, for a travel visa. Per the granddaughter of another Dutch national Peppy Sterinheim Lewin made the request. Either one or both of the above sought to reach
Curaçao, then a Dutch colony, with subsequent plans to reach the United States. Dekker was operating out of the Dutch consulate in
Riga, Latvia. They were informed that no visa would be required, but travelers were instead required to obtain permission from the governor to land. Gutwirth or Lewin convinced de Dekker to issue the travel document with the second phrase omitted, instead only indicating that no visa was required. The island had been providing fuel via its oil refineries to
Allied forces, and was unwilling to let in immigrants from enemy territories. Dekker requested and authorized the Dutch honorary consul
Jan Zwartendijk to issue the same text to Jews in Kovno who wished to escape from Lithuania. Japanese embassies and consulates except Kaunas issued 3,448 Japanese transit visas from January 1940 to March 1941. Nearly half of the recipients held valid end-visas and immediately departed Japan. The number of Jewish refugees who came to Japan, as seen in Table 1, has been documented as 4,500, 5,000 or 6,000. The 552 persons noted in the second row of the table do not match the number of departing persons edited by Jewcom. The Siberian railway had been closed and no evidence supporting this figure is found in JDC annual reports or MOFA documents. For the 200 persons described in Note 1 of Table 1, there is a document in the Archives of MOFA that the Japanese consulate of Vladivostok transferred about 50 Jewish refugees who had been stranded in Vladivostok to Shanghai with Soviet Union cargo on 26 April 1941.
Sugihara's Visas At the time, the Japanese government required that Japanese transit visas be issued only to those who had gone through appropriate immigration procedures, had enough funds and an onward final destination. Most of the refugees did not fulfill these criteria. Sugihara dutifully contacted the
Japanese Foreign Ministry three times for instructions. Each time, the Ministry responded that anybody granted a visa should be in possession of a destination visa to an onward country beyond Japan, without exception. Being aware that applicants were in danger if they stayed behind, Sugihara decided to ignore his orders and, from July 18 to August 28, 1940, he issued over 2100 transit visas. Given his inferior post and the culture of the Japanese Foreign Service bureaucracy, this was an unusual act of disobedience. He spoke to Soviet officials who agreed to let the Jews travel through the country via the
Trans-Siberian Railway. His wife Yukiko who supported and encouraged him later recalled, "My husband and I talked about the visas before he issued them. We understood that both the Japanese and German governments disagreed with our ideas, but we went ahead anyhow." Sugihara continued to hand-write visas, reportedly spending 18 to 20 hours a day on them, producing a normal month's worth of visas each day, until September 4, 1940, when he had to leave his post before the consulate was closed. Sugihara reportedly worked at a quick pace and aimed to issue 200 to 300 visas each day. By the end of his time at Kaunas, he had granted thousands of visas to Jews, many of whom were heads of households and thus permitted to take their families with them. Some sources say that before he left, he handed the official consulate stamp to a refugee so that more visas could be forged. His son, Nobuki Sugihara, adamantly insisted in an interview with
Ann Curry that his father never gave the stamp to anyone. According to witnesses, he was still writing visas while in transit from his hotel and after boarding the train at
Kaunas railway station, throwing visas into the crowd of desperate refugees out of the train's window even as the train pulled out. His son Hiroki noted, "my father continued to pen visas even at the railway station, throwing the last stamped passports out of the window of our train". In final desperation, blank sheets of paper with only the consulate seal and his signature (that could be later written over into a visa) were hurriedly prepared and flung out from the train. As he prepared to depart, he said, "Please forgive me. I cannot write anymore. I wish you the best." When he bowed deeply to the people before him, someone exclaimed, "Sugihara. We'll never forget you. I'll surely see you again!" Sugihara himself wondered about official reaction to the thousands of visas he issued. Many years later, he recalled, "No one ever said anything about it. I remember thinking that they probably didn't realize how many I actually issued." Lucille Szepsenwol Camhi, who was a teenager when she and her sister escaped from Poland to Lithuania stated in a 1999 oral interview with the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that: : People tried to get out, to go somewhere, but there was no particular place you could go because either it was under the Russians or under the Germans, and the war was in between. In the summer of 1940, Camhi and her sister stood outside the Japanese consulate in Lithuania in long lines on multiple occasions days apart in hopes of making it inside. When they finally pushed their way up the crowded staircase, the sisters pleaded with Sugihara, telling him that their mother had no papers and their father was dead. “He looked very sympathetic[ally] at us, and he just stamped, gave us the visa right there on the spot,” Camhi recalled in 1999. “My sister and I got hysterical, started to cry, and started to say, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ in Polish. And he just raised his hand, like saying, ‘It’s OK.’ And that’s it, and we went out of the room.”
Numbers saved On the number of refugees passing through Japan who held Japanese transit visas for Curaçao issued by Sugihara, the so-called "Sugihara visa", there are two documents stating numbers of 2,200 and 6,000.
The Japan Times, dated 19 January 1985, had the headline "Japanese Man honored for saving 6,000 Jews"; the
Los Angeles Times reported, "Sugihara defied orders from Tokyo and issued transit visas to nearly 6,000 Jews". US newspapers referred to Sugihara as "a diplomat who defied his government's orders and issued transit visas for 6,000 Jews". Table 2 shows the number of refugees who had stayed at Kobe in 1941 based on Archives of MOFA. Refugees classified as "No visa" in the table are presumed to have held fakes of Japanese transit visas issued by Sugihara. The Soviets wanted to purge Polish refugees who had been stranded in Soviet territory with Japanese transit visas as soon as possible, and so permitted them to get on the train to
Vladivostok with or without a destination visa. The Japanese government was forced to admit them. On 8 April 1941, of the 1,400 Polish Jews staying at Kobe, about 1,300 were "for Curaçao" or "No visa". The Polish ambassador in Tokyo,
Tadeusz Romer, remembered, "They (Polish refugees) only had fictitious Dutch visas for the island of Curaçao and Japanese transit visas." According to the refugee name list surveyed by Fukui Prefecture, of the 306 persons who landed at Tsuruga Port in October 1940, there were 203 Poles. Their destinations were US 89, Palestine 46, Curaçao 24, and others. It is estimated that about 80% of them were on the Sugihara visa list. The documents of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and "Refugee and Survivor" do not mention the number of people saved by a "Sugihara visa". More than half of the refugees who entered with invalid visas, including a "Sugihara visa", obtained valid visas with the help of
JDC,
HIAS, the Embassy of Poland, and the Japanese government, and embarked for host countries. In August–September 1941, Japanese authorities transferred about 850 refugees stranded in Japan to Shanghai before Japan and the United States began war. According to Emigration Table by Jewcom, the number of Polish refugees leaving Japan for various destinations was Shanghai 860, US 532, Canada 186, Palestine 186, Australia 81, South Africa 59, and others 207, in total 2,111. The total number of Jews saved by Sugihara is in dispute, with estimates around 6,000; family visas—which allowed several people to travel on one visa—were also issued, which would account for the much higher figure. Research into the ratio of "accompanying family members" to valid visa holders published in the 2022 book
Emerging Heroes by Akira Kitade concludes that "3,000 is the appropriate final number" (p. 132). The
Simon Wiesenthal Center has estimated that Chiune Sugihara issued transit visas for about 6,000 Jews and that around 40,000 descendants of the Jewish refugees are alive today because of his actions. Polish intelligence produced some forged visas. Sugihara's widow and eldest son estimate that he saved 10,000 Jews from certain death, whereas Boston University professor and author
Hillel Levine also estimates that he helped "as many as 10,000 people," but that far fewer people ultimately survived. Some Jews who received Sugihara's visas did not leave Lithuania in time, were captured by the Germans after
Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and perished in the Holocaust. The
Diplomatic Record Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has opened to the public two documents concerning Sugihara's file: the first aforementioned document is a 5 February 1941 diplomatic note from Chiune Sugihara to Japan's then Foreign Minister
Yōsuke Matsuoka in which Sugihara stated he issued 1,500 out of 2,139 transit visas to Jews and Poles; however, since most of the 2,139 people were not Jewish, this would imply that most of the visas were given to Polish Jews instead. Levine then notes that another document from the same foreign office file "indicates an additional 3,448 visas were issued in
Kaunas for a total of 5,580 visas" which were likely given to Jews desperate to flee Lithuania for safety in Japan or Japanese occupied-China. Many refugees used their visas to travel across the Soviet Union to
Vladivostok and then by boat to
Kobe, Japan, where there was a
Jewish community. Romer, the Polish ambassador in Tokyo, organized help for them. From August 1940 to November 1941, he had managed to get transit visas in Japan, asylum visas to Canada, Australia,
New Zealand, and
Burma, immigration certificates to British
Mandatory Palestine, and immigrant visas to the United States and some Latin American countries for more than two thousand Polish-Lithuanian Jewish refugees, who arrived in
Kobe, Japan, and the
Shanghai Ghetto, China. The remaining number of Sugihara survivors stayed in Japan until they were deported to Japanese-occupied Shanghai, where there was already
a large Jewish community that had existed as early as the mid-1930s. Some took the route through Korea directly to Shanghai without passing through Japan. A group of thirty people, all possessing a visa of "Jakub Goldberg", were shuttled back and forth on the open sea for several weeks before finally being allowed to pass through
Tsuruga. Most of the around 20,000 Jews survived
the Holocaust in the Shanghai ghetto until the
Japanese surrender in 1945, three to four months following the collapse of the Third Reich itself. ==Imprisonment and release ==