NO１Sugihara Chiune
Sugihara Chiune was born on January 1,1900,in a small village in Yaoyu,in Gifu Prefecture.
Yaotu is located at the middle reaches of Kisogawa River and surrounded by mountains with the height of from 500m to 600m above the sea level.
This area had been a foothold of driving a raft to transport of Kiso cypress until the Enakyou Dam was completed in 1924 at the upper reaches of the Kisogawa River.
The year of 1900 when Chune was born hit just the middle year between Shino-Japanese War and Russo-Japanese War.
In this year,the Boxer Rebellion happened and Russia advanced deeper into Manchuria.
So, the argument had gained predominance that Japan should alley with the United Kingdom.
In the process to Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902,there were some confusions within the Japanese government.
The confusion continued to the 1930's taking other form,and gave a great influence to the work of Sugihara as a diplomat.
NO2 Cunsel of Lithuania
Sugihara Chiune,a student of Waseda University then,happned to see a notice by the Foreign Ministry in the newpaper.It was recruiting students who wished to study foreign languages abroad and then work for the Ministry.
He applied for the Russian program and was accepted.The Foreign Ministry sent him to Harbin,a city in northeastern China.He was only nineteen years old.
Harbin was a cosmopolitan city with many Western-style buildings and avenues.
There were many Russians refugees from the Russian Revolution,and Sugihara met many Russians and improved his language skills.
In 1924,Sugihara became a clerk and interpreter for the Japanese Foreign Ministry and was posted to Manchuria.In 1932,Manchuria was declared an independent state by Japan,and renamed Manchukuo.
Sugihara became an official belonging to the Foreign Ministry of Manchukuo.
Manchukuo was built as a puppet state,and the Japanese officials and soldiers acted there as if it was their own homeland.
Sugihara could not bear the terrible, cruel behavior of the Japanese in Manchukuo and resigned his post in 1935.
In that same year,he met in Tokyo his wife-to-be,Yukiko.
In 1937,Sugihara left for Europe by ship with his wife to take up a new post as an interpreter at the Japanese legation in Helsinki.
Two years later,however,he received an official order to open a consulate in Kaunus,Lithuania.
NO3 Visas for lives
Sugihara had faced fatal incident and so did Jews even more in Kaunas,Lithuania.
Sugihara encountered a number of Jewish people driven away from the persecution by Nazis, Germany there.
The Jewish refugees rushed to the consulate in Kaunas to get transit visas through Japan in order to run away from Natzis' pursuit.
In the custom procedure for consulate to issue transit visa, they needed to present visas issued form the countries of their destination or other documents instead of that,but the refugees had no definite destination,much less any entry visas to any other country.
There weren't European countries to accept the Jewish refugees driven away,and the government of the United Kingdom ruling Palestine restricted severely the number of Jewish people who immigrated to Palestine.
Sugihara send telegrams several times for the Foreign Ministry of Japan to permit to issue transit visas of Japan in 1940 but returned the same answer from the Ministry,"No!".
Finally,he determined to issue visas to those people of his own accord without any official permission.
Sugihara had continued to issue 2139 visas known as Sugihara List during the times from July to August 26 of that year.
On August 29,Sugihara was ordered to close the Japanese Consulate in Kaunus and transfer to the embassy in Berlin.
He kept on writing out visas for a group of Jewish people on the platform when he sat aboard the train for Belrin.
The number of Jewish people saved by Sugihara's visas amounted to about 6000.
And the Jewish people hadn't forgotten about Sugihara Chiune.
They had searched their benefactor and finally found him working in a trade company in Tokyo in 1968.
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