Chiune Sugihara: The Diplomat Who Wrote Visas for Life

On the morning of 27 July 1940, Chiune Sugihara looked out of the window of the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania, and saw a crowd gathered at the gate. They were Jewish refugees, most of them from Poland, and they had come to ask for something almost no one else in Europe would give them: a way out.

Sugihara was a career diplomat, forty years old, posted to a small consulate in a small country that was about to disappear. Over the next five weeks he would disobey his own foreign ministry and write, by hand, more than two thousand transit visas. Because a single visa could cover an entire family, the number of people he helped to escape is usually estimated at around six thousand. Their descendants today are believed to number in the tens of thousands.

A Consulate at the Edge of the War

Sugihara was born on 1 January 1900 in Gifu Prefecture, Japan. He studied English at Waseda University before joining the foreign ministry and training in Harbin, Manchuria, where he became fluent in Russian. That skill shaped his career. In 1939, as the Second World War began, he was sent to open a consulate in Kaunas, then the temporary capital of Lithuania. The posting had little to do with Lithuania itself. Japan wanted a listening post near the borders of Germany and the Soviet Union, and Sugihara's task was largely to report on troop movements.

Within weeks of his arrival, Germany and the Soviet Union had divided Poland between them. Thousands of Polish Jews fled east and north into Lithuania, which was still independent. Kaunas filled with refugees: yeshiva students, families, Zionist activists, and members of the Bund. Then, in June 1940, the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania. The refugees were trapped. Behind them lay German-occupied Poland; around them, a Soviet state that was closing foreign consulates and would soon begin its own deportations.

The Curaçao Loophole

The escape route that emerged was improbable. Jan Zwartendijk, the acting Dutch consul in Kaunas, discovered that Curaçao, a Dutch colony in the Caribbean, technically required no entry visa. He began writing a note in refugees' passports stating that no visa was needed for Curaçao. But to reach the Caribbean from Soviet Lithuania, a refugee would have to cross the entire Soviet Union by rail to Vladivostok and then sail to Japan. That required a Japanese transit visa.

Sugihara cabled Tokyo three times asking for permission to issue the visas. Each time the answer was the same: refugees could be admitted only if they held a valid final destination visa and enough money for the journey. Most of the people at his gate had neither. The ministry's instructions were clear, and disobeying them meant risking his career and possibly more.

According to his wife Yukiko's later account, the couple discussed the decision over several nights. Sugihara later described his reasoning in plain terms: the people outside were human beings, and they needed help. He decided to issue the visas anyway.

Twenty-Nine Days of Writing

From late July to the end of August 1940, Sugihara wrote visas nearly every waking hour. He wrote them by hand, in ink, with the consulate's seal, working through the paperwork for hours each day until his hand ached and Yukiko massaged it in the evenings so he could continue. He relaxed the requirements as he went: applicants without money or proper papers received visas anyway. Refugees who had once queued in desperation now queued in hope.

The official visa register, which survives in the archives of the Japanese foreign ministry, lists 2,139 visas issued in Kaunas. Because the register stops before Sugihara did, and because children were often included on a parent's document, historians estimate that the true number of people covered was substantially higher.

The Soviet authorities ordered all foreign consulates in Kaunas closed. Sugihara stalled, negotiating an extension, and kept writing. When the consulate finally closed on 28 August, he moved to a hotel and continued issuing visas there. Witnesses recalled that he was still writing at the Kaunas railway station on 4 September as his train prepared to depart for Berlin, handing documents through the carriage window. When the train pulled out, he reportedly bowed to the people left on the platform and apologized that he could not do more.

The Journey East

A visa was only the beginning. Holders then had to buy tickets on the Trans-Siberian Railway, a journey of roughly nine thousand kilometers, paid for in hard currency that most refugees did not have. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and other relief organizations helped fund the passage. From Vladivostok, the refugees crossed to the port of Tsuruga in Japan, where local residents met the ships and, by many accounts, treated the exhausted arrivals with kindness.

In Kobe, the Japanese authorities extended the refugees' transit permits far beyond the ten days stated on the visas. Some eventually secured onward passage to the United States, Canada, Palestine, or Australia. Most, however, were moved in 1941 to Japanese-occupied Shanghai, where they spent the rest of the war in the Hongkew district, which the Japanese later designated a restricted area for stateless refugees. Conditions there were harsh, but the Shanghai refugees survived. Among them was the entire Mir Yeshiva, the only European yeshiva to come through the Holocaust intact as an institution.

Those who did not receive visas, or who could not leave Lithuania before the German invasion of June 1941, were largely murdered. Of the roughly 220,000 Jews in Lithuania in 1941, more than ninety percent were killed, most of them shot in mass executions in the forests and forts outside cities like Kaunas and Vilnius. The Sugihara visas separated two fates that had, weeks earlier, been indistinguishable.

After the War

Sugihara served the rest of the war in Prague, Königsberg, and Bucharest. When Soviet forces entered Romania in 1944, he and his family were interned for more than a year. He returned to Japan in 1947. That same year the foreign ministry asked him to resign. The ministry maintained for decades that this was part of a general postwar reduction of staff; Sugihara and his family believed he was being punished for Kaunas. He spent much of his later life working for a Japanese trading company in Moscow, largely separated from his family and unknown to the public.

The survivors had not forgotten him. In 1968, Yehoshua Nishri, an economic attaché at the Israeli embassy in Tokyo and himself a Sugihara visa holder, tracked him down. Testimonies were gathered, and in 1985 Yad Vashem recognized Chiune Sugihara as Righteous Among the Nations. He was too ill to travel to Jerusalem; his wife and son accepted the honor on his behalf. He died the following year, on 31 July 1986, in Kamakura. Only after a delegation from Israel attended his funeral did many of his neighbors learn what he had done.

Recognition in his own country came later. In 2000, on the centenary of his birth, the Japanese foreign ministry formally honored him and installed a commemorative plaque at its headquarters. The former consulate building in Kaunas is now the Sugihara House museum. A street in Vilnius, a square in Nagoya, a memorial in Los Angeles, and a tree at Yad Vashem all carry his name.

Why Sugihara Matters

Sugihara was not a resistance fighter. He had no army, no network, and no plan beyond the piece of paper in front of him. What he had was a rubber stamp, a pen, and a signature that governments would honor. He used them, continuously, until the moment he was physically removed from the place where they worked.

His story is often told as a story of one man, but it depended on others: Zwartendijk and the Curaçao notation, the Joint's funding of rail tickets, officials in Kobe who chose not to enforce a ten-day limit, and the refugees themselves who undertook a journey across two continents on the strength of a document that was, strictly speaking, not supposed to exist. Rescue during the Holocaust was almost always a chain, and it broke whenever one link chose not to act. In Kaunas in the summer of 1940, the link held.