page_title: Chiune Sugihara
section_title: Jewish refugees
hierarchical_section_title: Chiune Sugihara / Lithuania / Jewish refugees
caption_attribution_description: English: to understand Jewish refugees who were saved by Sugihara visa.
context_page_description: Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat who served as vice-consul for the Japanese Empire in Kaunas, Lithuania. During the Second World War, Sugihara helped about 6,000 Jews flee Europe by issuing transit visas to them so that they could travel through Japanese territory, risking his job and the lives of his family. The fleeing Jews were refugees from German-occupied Western Poland and Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland, as well as residents of Lithuania. In 1985, the State of Israel honored Sugihara as one of the Righteous Among the Nations for his actions. He is the only Japanese national to have been so honored. The year 2020 is "The Year of Chiune Sugihara" in Lithuania. It has been estimated as many as 100,000 people alive today are the descendants of the recipients of Sugihara visas.
context_section_description: As the Soviet Union occupied sovereign Lithuania in 1940, many Jewish refugees from Poland (Polish Jews) as well as Lithuanian Jews tried to acquire exit visas. Without the visas, it was dangerous to travel, yet it was impossible to find countries willing to issue them. Hundreds of refugees came to the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, trying to get a visa to Japan. At the time, on the brink of the war, Lithuanian Jews made up one third of Lithuania's urban population and half of the residents of every town as well. In the period between 16 July and 3 August 1940 the Dutch Honorary Consul Jan Zwartendijk provided over 2,200 Jews with an official third destination to Curaçao, a Caribbean island and Dutch colony that required no entry visa, or Surinam (which, upon independence in 1975, became Suriname). 
  European Jewish refugees began to arrive in Japan in July 1940 and departed by September 1941. An overview during this period is described in the Annual Report of 1940 and 1941 by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC).
  In June 1940, Italy entered into the war and the Mediterranean route was closed. "The Committee in Great Germany, forced to seek new outlets for emigration, arranged for the transportation of Jews from Germany across Europe and Asia (via the trans-Siberian railway) to Vladivostok, thence to Japan. From Japan the refugees were to embark for countries in the Western Hemisphere". "On December 31, 1940, Soviet Union declared giving all persons residing in Lithuania on September 1, 1940 the right to apply for Soviet citizenship. While the great bulk of Polish refugees in Lithuania opted for Soviet citizenship, there was a group of 4,000–5,000 persons for whom the New Order offered little opportunity. These were principally rabbis, yeshiva students, members of the intellectual classes and leaders of various Jewish communal and labor organizations. They immediately applied for exit permits from Lithuania. Although during the early weeks of 1941 exit permits and Japanese transit visas were readily granted, the problem was how to find transportation costs for those people whose very existences were jeopardized if they remained in Lithuania. The JDC in collaboration with a number of other American Jewish groups, contributed toward the funds required for the trans-Siberian trip to Japan of 1,700 persons".
  In July 1940, Jewish refugees in Germany and other countries began arriving at Tsuruga, Shimonoseki and Kobe. Japanese embassies and consulates except Kaunas issued 3,448 Japanese transit visas from January 1940 to mid-March 1941. Most of them held valid end-visas and immediately departed Japan. From October 1940, Polish refugees from Lithuania began to land on Tsuruga. Their number increased sharply from January 1941. "By the end of March there were close to 2,000 in the country, mostly in Kobe. More than half of these refugees did not hold valid end-visas and were unable to proceed further than Japan". They were forced to stay for a long time to find the immigration countries.
  The number of Jewish refugees who came to Japan, as shown in Table 1, has documents with 4,500, 5,000 or 6,000. 552 persons of the second row of the table do not match the number of departing persons edited by Jewcom. Siberian railway had been closed and no evidence supporting this figure is found in JDC annual reports or MOFA documents. For 200 persons described in note 1 of Table 1, there is a document in Archives of MOFA that the Japanese consulate of Vladivostok transferred about 50 Jewish refugees who had stranded in Vladivostok to Shanghai with Soviet Union cargo on April 26, 1941.
caption: Table 1: Number of European Jewish arriving in Japan
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