Sugihara Chiune and the Soviet Union: new documents, new perspectives

ENThe present publication includes 91 excerpts from documents in Russian, Japanese, Israeli, Lithuanian, Polish and Finnish Archives. These materials were gathered in the course of a joint Japanese-Russian research project begun in 2012 by the three editors of this collection. [...] Following introductions by each of the editors who treat different aspects of Sugihara’s activities, the documentation part of the book is divided into eight sections. The First Section covers materials from Sugihara’s fifteen years associated with Harbin, a treaty port on the Sungari (Songhua) river in Northeast China. First as a student, then as a government employee responsible for relations with Russians and the Soviet Union, Sugihara experienced the complex international history of this rapidly growing city located at the point where Chinese, Japanese and Russian influences met in the first half of the twentieth century. [...] Soviet officialdom’s negative views on Sugihara developed during his Harbin period are closely related to the Second Section regarding the Soviet refusal to give Sugihara a visa in 1937, ostensibly because of his ties to anti-Soviet “White Russians.” [...] The Third Section has a small group of materials from the Finnish police archives held in the National Archives of Finland. [...] They showcase Sugihara’s budding intelligence skills, as he continued a long tradition of Japanese-Finnish cooperation against a neighboring Russian threat, again working with emigres, but now in Russia’s western borderlands. [...] Section Four covers Sugihara’s one year stint at Kaunas in 1939–40, that city’s last year as the capital of independent Lithuania, soon to be absorbed by the Soviet Union.It was here that he organized an intelligence network covering occupied Poland, just across the border, and committed his most memorable deed, the issuance of at least 2139 life saving transit visas, without the sanction of the Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka who steadily refused to recognize the desperate situation. [...] Section Five is drawn from NKVD (internal police) files investigating the preparation of fake Japanese visas, bearing Sugihara’s signature, between November 1940 and February 1941. In this way, several hundred additional lives were saved. [...] Section Six offers materials that cover the actual transit, including organizational mechanisms, problems encountered and the ways in which they were overcome. [...] Section Seven, is brief and covers our limited knowledge of the Sugiharas themselves becoming transit passengers. Section Eight includes materials from Sugihara’s 15 years working in Moscow for various Japanese companies between 1960 and 1975. [...] The Appendix includes Sugihara’s list of visas issued, all 2139 names in a facsimile provided by the Japanese Foreign Ministry. Footnotes provide some biographical, geographical or explanatory information on points that might be unfamiliar for Japanese, Russian or other readers. [p. ix-xiii.