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LONDON - When Japan's Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko visited the monument of Chiune Sugihara in Lithuania last weekend, many TV programmes in Japan had to explain who the obscure diplomat was.
For years, few Japanese knew the incredible story of how the man dubbed "Japan's Schindler" saved perhaps 6000 Jews from the Nazis during World War II despite working for a fascist ally of Germany.
Unlike Oscar Schindler, the German industrialist who turned against the Nazis and rescued almost 1100 Jews from the Holocaust, Sugihara had to wait until just seven years ago for his bravery to be officially recognised.
Sugihara was acting consul in Lithuania's temporary wartime capital when he was ordered to abandon his post as the Germans advanced in 1940. A fourth of the city's population was Jewish, mostly prosperous and well-integrated, and few were ready to believe the horror stories from nearby Poland until it was too late to flee.
By an accident of history the mild-mannered diplomat - one of just two left in the city - became their last hope for survival.
The crossroads in Sugihara's life came one night in July 1940 when he woke up to find a group of refugees outside his window demanding visas to the Soviet Union. He decided to help but his repeated requests to Tokyo for permission to issue the visas were denied.
Despite facing disgrace or worse for his family, he decided to follow his conscience and signed as many visas as he could, in defiance of his Government.
Sugihara sat from July 31 to August 28 in 1940 painstakingly writing out 10-day transit visas by hand, even enlisting his wife Yukiko to help him.
By the time they boarded a Berlin-bound train on September 1, 1940, still scribbling out the last visa, they had saved about 6000 people, including hundreds of children. Sugihara's final act in the besieged city was to hand his consular stamp to a refugee, who went on issuing passes.
Sugihara's reward for his heroism was dismissal from the Foreign Ministry immediately after the war. Disgraced in Japan, he was forced to eke out a living as a part-time translator and ended his life working for a trading company with connections to Russia. He died in 1986 and his family had to wait until 14 years later for then Foreign Minister Yohei Kono to formally apologise.
A year before he passed away, he was honoured for his work in rescuing the Lithuanian refugees by the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Israel. The award stunned those who heard about it in Japan, where Sugihara had lived in obscurity for years.
To have the Emperor pay his respects at the shrine is the ultimate seal of approval in Japan for Sugihara's bravery.
"The visit by the imperial couple makes me feel as though his humanitarian actions have again been rewarded," one of his surviving family members told the Asahi newspaper.
- INDEPENDENT
