The Schindler of Japan, Chihune Sugihara
tokyoweekender.com
tokyoweekender.com
It's a shame that he lost his career over it. I'm glad to see him finally getting the recognition he deserves.
> John Rabe was an ordinary German businessman in China when the Japanese invaded Nanking in 1937. Nearly 70 years later, a memorial was dedicated to the "Good German" who saved thousands of Chinese lives.
https://www.dw.com/en/memorial-dedicated-to-the-oskar-schind...
> Ho Feng Shan: The 'Chinese Schindler' who saved thousands of Jews
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/19/asia/china-jews-schindler...
People like him, Raoul Wallenberg and Schindler put everything at risk because they understood their sacrifice had 1000x leverage on others lives.
We should all aspire to be as courageous if the opportunity presents itself.
The most cost-effective [0] charities are a thousand times more effective at helping people as regular charities. For example, for ~$0.5 you can cure a child of parasitic worms in their stomach. For ~$3 you can protect someone form malaria for ~4 years.
You can join thousands of others who choose to give at least 10% of their income to the mot cost-effective charities they can find [1]
And join the Effective Altruism movement to be involved in helping others effectively [2]
[0] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
Every now and again, the opportunity comes by you to tick a box that determines how your country treats them, an act which can make a difference while costing you nothing and incurring no personal risk.
Read: While costing a lot and putting you at high risk.
How can you say otherwise?
Accomodating and feeding people are among the most expensive things that exist. Refugees are very expensive for societies that take them in!
Unfortunately your wishful thinking does not match reality. I know everything could be so nice, but in reality you will steal, when you have nothing/little putting those around you at risk.
I argue that it created costs [for him and/or others] and put him (and others) at increased risk.
1) Think Sugihara was right 2) Believe that taking refugees into europe is worse on average/bad
All it takes is a different reason for Sugihara to be right
So Japan did not torpedo US Liberty ships headed to Russia, and various other surprising things. (Japan obeyed international treaties to the letter, but did not follow any human rights conventions.)
Of course, at the end of WW2, Russia turned their vast army and artillery eastward, and annihiliated the Japanese army.
Source: I study WW2.
This makes me curious. What other things?
Stalin only agreed to break the non-aggression pact once it became clear that no invasion from the west was coming, which was fairly late in the war (Yalta).
Of the ~1,092,400 Japanese soldiers facing Russia, only 22,300-23,600 were killed according to Japan (Russia places the figure at 83,737):
Not according to them[1]:
"More than ever before, the historical record confirms what those soldiers knew in their gut: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hideous as they were, shortened the war that Japan had begun and saved an immensity of lives. Far from considering itself essentially defeated, the Japanese military was preparing for an Allied assault with a massive buildup in the south. It was only the shock of the atomic blasts that enabled Japanese leaders who wanted to stop the fighting to successfully press for a surrender.
"'We of the peace party were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to end the war,' Kido Koichi, one of Emperor Hirohito's closest aides, later recalled. Hisatsune Sakomizu, the chief Cabinet secretary, called the bomb 'a golden opportunity given by heaven for Japan to end the war.'"
[1] http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/...
If I'm not mistaken, they hadn't signed any.
"In Search of Sugihara" by Hillel Levine
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1119369.In_Search_of_Sug...
It seems to be readily available on kindle, but harder to find in print.
https://jewishjournal.com/news/318809/spanish-schindler-who-...
Aristides de Sousa Mendes, was a portuguese diplomat in Bordeux France.
He against explicit orders granted 30k visas of which 10k were jews.
His diplomatic career was terminated. He was shunned back in Portugal, died in debt, feed by a Jewish soup kitchen.
Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer characterized Sousa Mendes' deed as "perhaps the largest rescue action by a single individual during the Holocaust."
In his own words: “From now on I’m giving everyone visas, there will be no more nationalities, races or religion. I cannot allow all you people to die...”
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristides_de_Sousa_Mendes
It's important to note that, unlike Germany, Japan has never really admitted or apologized for what they did. See this shocking video by historian Mark Felton about what you can find today in a Japanese museum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngzesh6eN14
The Nazis were on a mission to annihilate the Jews, so in relative term they killed many, but in absolute terms the Japanese probably victimized a lot more people. It's just that there were a lot of Chinese people to victimize, so the magnitude of the crime is less apparent.
Their cruelty was even worse in some ways, as it was officially sanctioned and encouraged by their institutions as such. The Nazis, while they did not hide their hate for the Jews, went to some lengths to hide what they were actually doing to them -- which is probably how the German population could claim to not know what was going on. (To quote Speer: "I didn't know, I could have known, I should have known." He's been vilified but I haven't seen anything to paint him as a liar as far as this is concerned.)
Put simply, the Germans are ashamed of that past, even the Nazis had shown some signs that they knew it was shameful, but the Japanese have never demonstrated any shame.
However I think you're grossly building up Germans as ignorant goodmen.
While painting the Japanese as complicit evil doers.
The truth is the only reason Germans are ashamed of the past are due to 2 reasons:
1 the allies occupation of Germany spent lots of resources into exposing the crimes of the nazis.
And even then the Germans were proud of the nazis up until the 1980s.
And 2 every institution was torn down more or less after the nazis and rebuild from scratch with some having oversight built into it.
This did not happen in the occupation of japan.
And you can see the same "complicity" with the 3rd holocaust that was done in Croatia/ Bosnia against predominantly Serbs.
Hell even Spain has the issue of the public still being proud of the fascists.
Or lastly UK still has a sizable portion of its citizens that believes the Uk colonialism was ultimately good and righteous.
That's not at all what I'm saying, if you mean Germans during WW2. However if we're talking about today, it's certainly the case that Germans are unequivocal about their past while Japanese people as a whole are not.
While it's credible that the average German civilian didn't know what was going on (though they would have known _something_ was going on), Speer certainly knew: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/mar/13/secondworldwar...
The point here is that Japanese soldiers were massively trained to perform horrible things. They mistreated prisoners of war, civilians, anyone, everywhere, and new recruits were forced to perform horrors as part of their induction. Germans on the other hand respected the rules of war in the West (though certainly not in the East) for instance, except obviously for the SS. They were certainly keen to appear legit in that respect. The Japanese were not, ever.
> In the letter to Jeanty, written on December 23 1971, Speer wrote: "There is no doubt - I was present as Himmler announced on October 6 1943 that all Jews would be killed".
Not much plausible deniability there. He lied at the time to avoid being executed.
Read Gitta Sereny's "Albert Speer, his battle with the truth". It's a thick book, but fascinating. She casts serious doubt on Speer's assertion that he didn't know about the death camps, or that Jews were systematically being exterminated.