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Fugu Plan
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The was a scheme created in the 1930s in Imperial Japan with the idea of settling Jewish refugees escaping Nazi-occupied Europe in Japan's territories on the Asian mainland to Japan's benefit. The plan was first discussed in 1934, and solidified in 1938 at the Five Ministers' Conference, but the signing of the Tripartite Pact in 1941, along with a number of other events, prevented its full implementation.
The plotters believed that the Jews could be quite beneficial to Japan, but also quite dangerous.
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The was a scheme created in the 1930s in Imperial Japan with the idea of settling Jewish refugees escaping Nazi-occupied Europe in Japan's territories on the Asian mainland to Japan's benefit. The plan was first discussed in 1934, and solidified in 1938 at the Five Ministers' Conference, but the signing of the Tripartite Pact in 1941, along with a number of other events, prevented its full implementation.
The plotters believed that the Jews could be quite beneficial to Japan, but also quite dangerous. Therefore, the plan was named after the Japanese delicacy "fugu", a puffer-fish whose poison can kill if the dish is not prepared exactly correctly.
The Plan
At its core, the Fugu Plan was a scheme to convince thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Jews to settle in the puppet state of Manchukuo or possibly Japan-occupied Shanghai, thus gaining not only the benefit of the supposed economic prowess of the Jews but also convincing the United States, specifically American Jewry, to grant their political favor and economic investment in Japan. The plan was partly based on an acceptance of European anti-Semitic mythology, as found for example in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The planners eventually came up with a detailed scheme, or rather, a set of options, for how the settlement would be organized, and how Jewish support, both in terms of investment and actual settlers, would be garnered. In June and July 1939, these schemes, under long names like "Concrete Measures to be Employed to Turn Friendly to Japan the Public Opinion Far East Diplomatic Policy Close Circle of President of USA by Manipulating Influential Jews in China," and "The Study and Analysis of Introducing Jewish Capital" came to be reviewed and approved by the top Japanese officials in China.
Methods of attracting both Jewish and American favor were offered, including the sending of a delegation to the United States, to introduce American rabbis to the similarities between Judaism and Shinto, and to bring these rabbis back to Japan, to introduce them and their religion to the Japanese. Methods were also suggested for gaining the favor of American journalism and Hollywood.
But the majority of the documents were devoted to the settlements. A number of sites in Manchuria were suggested, as well as areas near Shanghai. The Fugu Plan allowed for the settlement populations to range in size from 18,000 up to 600,000. Details of the land size of the settlement, as well as infrastructural arrangements, including schools, hospitals and the like were also detailed, for each level of population. It was agreed, by all the planners, that Jews in these settlements would be given complete freedom of religion, along with cultural and educational autonomy; while the Japanese were wary of giving the Jews too much political autonomy, it was felt that some freedom would be necessary to attract settlers, as well as economic investment. The Japanese officials asked to approve the Fugu Plan insisted that, while the settlements could appear autonomous, controls needed to be placed behind the scenes to keep the Jews under close watch and control. It was feared that the Jews might somehow penetrate into the mainstream Japanese government and economy, influencing or taking command of it in the same way that they (according to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion) had done in many other countries.
Ultimately, however, the Fugu Plan left it up to the world Jewish community to fund the settlements, and to supply settlers.
History
Before World War II
The Fugu Plan was originally the idea of a small group of Japanese government and military officials, who saw a need for a population to be established in Manchukuo (otherwise known as Manchuria), who could help build Japan's industry and infrastructure there. The primary members of this group included Captain Koreshige Inuzuka and Captain Norihiro Yasue, who came to be known as the "Jewish experts," along with industrialist Yoshisuke Aikawa and a number of officials in the Kwantung Army known as the “Manchurian Faction”.
Their decision to attract Jews to Manchukuo came from a belief that the Jewish people had a lot of money and an almost supernatural amount of political influence. Jacob Schiff, a Jewish-American banker who, thirty years earlier, offered such a great loan to the Japanese government that it helped Japan to win the Russo-Japanese War was well-known. In addition, a Japanese translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hoax claiming to detail the global Jewish conspiracy to control the world's economies and governments was in wide circulation at the time. These beliefs led some Japanese authorities to grossly overestimate the economic and political powers of the Jewish people, and their interconnectedness across the world due to the Jewish diaspora. It was assumed that by rescuing European Jews from the Nazis, Japan would gain unwavering and eternal favor from American Jewry.
In 1922, Yasue and Inuzuka returned from the Japanese Siberian Intervention, aiding the White Russians against the Red Army. This is where they first learned of the Protocols and came to be fascinated by the alleged powers of the Jewish people. Over the course of the 1920s, they wrote many reports on the Jews, and traveled to the British Mandate of Palestine (now Israel) to research the subject and to speak with Jewish leaders Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion. Yasue translated the Protocols into Japanese. The pair managed to get the Foreign Ministry of Japan interested in the project. Every Japanese embassy and consulate was requested to keep the ministry informed of the actions and movements of Jewish communities in their countries. Lots of reports came in, but none definitively proved the existence of a global conspiracy.
The so-called “Jewish experts” then joined forces, to an extent, with the Manchurian faction, a number of Japanese military officials who pushed for Japanese expansion into Manchuria. The faction was headed by Colonel Seishiro Itagaki and Lieutenant-Colonel Kanji Ishiwara. This was in 1931, just before the Mukden Incident which began the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
Unfortunately for the 'Jewish experts', a large part of the already significant Jewish population of the Manchurian city of Harbin departed in 1933, after the kidnapping, torture, and murder of Simon Kaspe. The Jews of Harbin no longer trusted the Japanese army, and so they fled to Shanghai or deeper into China. The Fugu Plan had hit its first major obstacle, before it even got off the ground. In 1937, after Yasue spoke with Jewish leaders in Harbin, the Far Eastern Jewish Council was established, and over the next several years, many meetings were held to discuss the idea of encouraging and establishing Jewish settlements in and around Harbin.
1938 brought the Five Ministers' Conference; five of the most powerful men in Japan gathered to discuss the ideas and plans of the "Jewish experts". They were Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, Foreign Minister Hachiro Arita, Army Minister Seishiro Itagaki, Naval Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, and Shigeaki Ikeda, Minister of Finance, Commerce, and Industry. They faced a great dilemma. On the one hand, Japan's alliance with Nazi Germany was growing stronger, and doing anything to help the Jews would endanger that relationship. On the other hand, the Jewish boycott of German goods following Kristallnacht showed the economic power and global unity of the Jews, and if Japan wished to woo the favor of the Jewish people, this was the perfect time, as many Jews were fleeing Europe and looking for somewhere to flee to. Since the Japanese cabinet, at the time, was run by consensus, not rule of majority, this meeting became one of the longest and most complicated meetings of this cabinet. Eventually, an agreement of sorts was reached; the government would allow the Fugu Plan to go ahead, but they would not do anything to endanger their relationship with Germany.
The next few years were filled with reports and meetings, not only between the proponents of the Plan, but also with members of the Jewish community. But the Plan never, in any official, organized way got off the ground. In 1939, the Jews of Shanghai requested that no more Jewish refugees be allowed into Shanghai, as their community's ability to support them was being stretched thin. Stephen Wise, one of the most well-known and influential members of the American Jewish community at the time, expressed his strong opinion that any Jewish-Japanese cooperation would be unpatriotic, a violation of the moral embargo that the United States had placed on Japan.
During World War II
In 1939 the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, making the transport of Jews from Europe to Japan far more difficult. The events of 1940 only solidified the impracticality of executing the Fugu Plan in any official, organized way. The USSR annexed the Baltic states, further cutting off the possibilities for Jews seeking to escape Europe. The Japanese government signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, completely eliminating the possibility of any official aid for the plan from Tokyo.
However, Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, began to issue, against orders from Tokyo, transit visas to escaping Jews, allowing them to travel to Japan and stay there for a limited time, ostensibly stopping off on their way to their final destination, the Dutch colony of Curaçao, which required no entry visa. Thousands of Jews received transit visas from him, or through similar means. Some even copied, by hand, the visa that Sugihara had written. After the grueling process of requesting exit visas from the Soviet government, many Jews were allowed to cross Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, taking a boat from Vladivostok to Tsuruga, eventually being settled in Kobe, Japan.
By the summer of 1941, the Japanese government was becoming anxious about having so many Jewish refugees in such a major city, and near major military and commercial ports. It was decided that the Jews of Kobe had to be relocated to Shanghai, occupied by Japan. Only those who had lived in Kobe before the arrival of the refugees were allowed to stay. Germany had violated the Non-aggression Pact, and declared war on the USSR, making Russia and Japan enemies, and therefore putting an end to the boats from Vladivostok to Tsuruga. Several months later, just after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japan seized all of Shanghai; monetary aid, and in fact all communications from American Jews ceased, due to the Anglo-American Trading with the Enemy Act and wealthy Baghdadi Jews, many of whom were British subjects, were interned as enemy nationals. The US Department of Treasury would have been fairly lax regarding communications and aid sent to the Jewish refugees in Shanghai, but the American Jewish organizations insisted on stalwartly showing their patriotism, and giving no hint of treasonous activity.
In 1942 the Japanese government officially rescinded the decision of the Five Ministers' Conference, fully and officially removing their already near-nonexistent support for the near-extinct Fugu Plan. Nazi Colonel Josef Meisinger, chief of the Gestapo (and later nicknamed the "Butcher of Warsaw"), arrived in Shanghai. He attempted to convince the local Japanese authorities to "exterminate" the Jewish refugees, or to put them to work in salt mines; in short, he brought Hitler and Himmler's Final Solution to Asia. The national government in Tokyo would not stand for this, and Meisinger's plans were reduced to simply the creation of what came to be known as the Shanghai ghetto: Jews in Shanghai were now forced to live in a "Designated Area for Stateless Refugees" on February 18, 1943. Jews were permitted to leave the one-square-mile area in Hongkew district, but only after procuring a pass from the Japanese official who oversaw the area. By the end of the war, most of the Jews were starving. The ghetto was bombed just months before the end of the war by Allied planes seeking to destroy a radio transmitter within the city.
Importance
The Fugu Plan, as envisioned by Yasue, Inuzuka, and others, had failed. Those Jews who did find their way to Japan, and to Japanese-controlled China, were not brought over in especially large numbers; far fewer made the trip than had applied for visas. The Jews were not helped in any large-scale or particularly official or organized way by the national government in Tokyo. And perhaps most disappointingly for the planners, those Jews who did settle in Kobe, and then in Shanghai did next to nothing to bolster the Japanese economy. These refugees who had come to Japan with literally nothing but the clothes on their back were not the wealthy and philanthropic American bankers and corporate leaders Yasue and Inuzuka had heard of, nor did they have the ability to elicit favor or aid for Japan from these men. Nevertheless, several thousand Jews were rescued from almost certain death in Nazi Europe by the policies surrounding Japan's temporary pro-Jewish attitude, and Chiune Sugihara was bestowed the honor of the Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli government in 1985. In addition, the Mir Yeshiva, one of the largest centers of rabbinical study today, and the only European yeshiva to survive the Holocaust, survived as a result of these events.
See also
External links
- (PDF) by David G. Goodman at HUJI
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