While Sugihara deserves recognition for saving lives, most of the stories about him play fast and loose with the facts. Sugihara neither risked his life, nor did he flout clear-cut instructions from his government, nor was he punished by being summarily removed from the diplomatic service as Yad Vashem stated in 1991 in a letter to me. He had received a raise, was offered a decoration, received a discharge allowance and a pension. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not discharge Mr. Sugihara unfairly. It had been assumed that Sugihara s claim to have issued the transit visas against Tokyo s orders were due to Japan s alliance with Germany and, therefore, for anti-Semitic reasons.
Nothing is further from the facts.
The Japanese government s basic policy toward the Jews did not change during the war. This is not simply my personal opinion, it is the position of Japan, and I have no compunction about announcing it to the world, issuing transit visas and permitting them to stay in Japan for as long as a year until two months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. At that time, approximately 1,000 persons, who had not managed to find another haven, were transported to Shanghai. She presented new material which shed new light on Sugihara s activities and revealed that he was an intelligence agent, deeply involved with Polish intelligence agents. Recently, additional material, with a new perspective on the activities of Chiune Sugihara, has been made public.