2020: The Year of Chiune Sugihara

August 31, 2020 4:16 PM

In October 2019, the Lithuanian Parliament approved the initiative to name 2020 the Year of Chiune Sugihara (Delfi.en), to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Japanese diplomat’s noble work, and celebrate what would be his 120th birthday. The celebratory peak of the year is Sugihara Week (Visit Kaunas), the event which celebrates the actions of Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara (Sugihara Week). For 29 days, from July 31 to August 28, 1940, he issued more than 6,000 "Visas for Life" (Chiune-Sugihara.jp), saving thousands of Jewish refugees. [via Mltshp] [Previously]

Chiune Sugihara, and his wife, Yukiko, may have been inspired by the kindness of an 11-year-old boy, Zalke Jenkins (Solly Ganor) (Ron Greene), and the example of Dutch Consul Jan Zvartendijk (Wikipedia), who with permission of his superior, Ambassador to Latvia L. P. J. de Decker, was giving visas to the Dutch Indies to Jewish refugees. Zwartendijk, with the help of aides, produced over 2,000 visas for Jews to Curaçao.

posted by filthy light thief (8 comments total)

At the end, when he is leaving and throwing blank stamped visa papers out the train window, apologising that he cannot do any more, I tear up every time. He was a hero.
posted by Meatbomb at 5:17 PM on August 31, 2020 [9 favorites]

Righteous Among the Nations. May his memory be a blessing.
posted by BlahLaLa at 5:36 PM on August 31, 2020 [12 favorites]

My grandparents, father, and uncle all came to the US on a Sugihara visa. My dad was quite young when the family left Warsaw. We knew that the family traveled to the US via Lithuania, Asia, and then entering the country by boat from Japan to San Francisco. Until the story of Sugihara came to public attention some years ago we had no way of making sense of this route. It gave us all a sense of place and history we had never quite had before.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 6:06 PM on August 31, 2020 [46 favorites]

There's an icon painted of him and some local church services (link). The orthodox tradition is bottom-up for saints, with local churches celebrating a saint until eventually one of the patriarchs gets around to widespread canonisation. He married a Russian orthodox woman (first wife, later divorced) and raised his children from the second marriage orthodox, so I often think of him as an example of saintliness, although as the thread points out, he was too humble to think that himself.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 11:10 PM on August 31, 2020 [5 favorites]

Oh hey, I’ve done some translation related to this guy, because there’s a museum dedicated to him in Tsuruga, Fukui. Sounds like he was a heck of a guy.
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:20 AM on September 1, 2020 [3 favorites]

Yes, a REAL saint, not the cardboard kind that did nothing but promote church dogma and be "holier than thou. He actually saved lives! May his memory be blessed, and never forgotten. I needed to be reminded that there are good human beings amid all the evil.
posted by mermayd at 7:28 AM on September 1, 2020 [2 favorites]

I came across this story a couple of years ago while researching a local architect and planner. Norbert Gorwic was a young architect in Poland who fled the country at the outbreak of the war. He was able to secure one of the Sugihara visas and made his way through Japan to the US and then London, where he served in the Polish exile air force. He eventually moved to Detroit where he became a city planner and designed a number of buildings and developments. He ended his career teaching at the University of Michigan Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, and there is a scholarship in his name.
posted by Preserver at 7:42 AM on September 1, 2020 [6 favorites]

I recently went on a date with a Sugihara visa descendant. Knowing the story already through my Baltic heritage it's hard to describe the emotion, that this person right in front of me wouldn't even exist if not for that absolute hero over there.
posted by UbuRoivas at 2:32 AM on September 2, 2020 [4 favorites]