Posted on: Friday, April 4, 2003

A sacrifice not soon forgotten

By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Columnist

For anyone who's ever played it safe, who decided not to say or do the right thing because they didn't want to get in trouble with the boss or criticized by the neighbors, there is the ultimate antidote: the Sugihara story.

Chiune Sugihara was the Japanese consul general in Lithuania in 1940. He and his wife, Yukiko, and their two small sons were living the comfortable life of a diplomat. One morning in July 1940, they awoke to a crowd shouting outside the gate of their home. They looked out the window and saw hundreds of scared, desperate people, Polish Jews who were fleeing the holocaust in their country and looking for safe passage to the Dutch-held island of Curacao. To get to the Carib-bean island, they needed to pass through Japan and the Soviet Union. They came to Sugihara to get transit visas to pass through Japan.

Sugihara contacted his superiors at the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo. Three times he asked permission to issue the visas, and each time, the answer was no. He decided to do it anyway.

For 29 days, Chiune and Yukiko Sugihara wrote transit visas by hand, turning out close to 300 a day. It was grueling work late into the night, but there were lives at stake. When Sugihara was forced to close the consulate, he continued to issue visas from his hotel room during his last few days in the country. He wrote visas even as his train was leaving Lithuania, and finally tossed his consul visa stamp out the window so those who needed visas could write more.

Historians now estimate that Sugihara issued 2,139 visas, but they were family visas, so the total number of people he saved is thought to be closer to 8,000.

For years, the story went untold. Sugihara never knew if any of the people he helped survived.

In 1969, a man who was saved by a transit visa sought out Sugihara to thank him. Soon, others came forward and told their story. Many still had the yellow piece of paper that Sugihara had written by hand, the paper that saved their lives.

Chiune Sugihara died in 1986. Yukiko Sugihara is 89 years old, and though she has traveled the world, only now is she fulfilling a dream to visit Hawai'i. While here, she has made a number of public appearances, all part of her pledge that "as long as my legs hold out, I will work for peace."

By disobeying the Japanese government, Sugihara lost his career as a diplomat, and there was the issue of shame for the family. But Yukiko shakes her head vigorously when asked if she ever had regrets.

There is much more to tell, but the heart of the story is that, though he knew it would cost him his career and quite possibly his life, Chiune Sugihara did the right thing.

An exhibit, "The Legacy of Chiune Sugihara" is at the Community Gallery of the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai'i through April 30. The gallery is open from 10a.m. to 4p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.