Jewish settlement in the Empire of Japan
Jewish settlement in the Empire of Japan began as early as the middle of the nineteenth century, but was confined to relatively small numbers of immigrants from Europe and Russia. Shortly prior to and during World War II, and coinciding with the Second Sino-Japanese War, tens of thousands of Jewish refugees were resettled in the Empire of Japan. The onset of the European war by Nazi Germany involved the lethal mass persecutions and genocide of Jews, later known as the Holocaust, resulting in thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing east. Most ended up in Japanese-occupied China.
Popular accounts of the resettlement plan have resurfaced in the 21st century on Chinese social media as an antisemitic conspiracy theory against China.
The memoranda
Memoranda written in 1930s Imperial Japan proposed settling Jewish refugees escaping Nazi-occupied Europe in Japanese-controlled territory. As interpreted by Marvin Tokayer and Swartz, they proposed that large numbers of Jewish refugees should be encouraged to settle in Manchukuo or Japan-occupied Shanghai, thus gaining the benefit of the supposed economic prowess of the Jews and also convincing the United States, and specifically American Jewry, to grant political favor and economic investment into Japan. The idea was partly based on the acceptance of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as being a genuine document by at least part of the Japanese leadership - but rather than arousing hatred of Jews, the intended effect of the Protocols, they actually caused the Japanese to consider the Jews as powerful potential allies for Japan.The detailed scheme included 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, the memoranda "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 to include the sending of a delegation to the United States, to introduce American rabbis to the similarities between Judaism and Shinto, and the bringing of rabbis back to Japan in order to introduce them and their religion to the Japanese. Methods were also suggested for gaining the favor of American journalism and Hollywood.
The majority of the documents were devoted to the settlements, allowing for the settlement populations to range in size from 18,000, up to 600,000. Details included the land size of the settlement, infrastructural arrangements, schools, hospitals etc. for each level of population. Jews in these settlements were to be given complete freedom of religion, along with cultural and educational autonomy. While the authors were wary of affording 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 plan insisted that while the settlements could appear autonomous, controls needed to be placed to keep the Jews under surveillance. 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 forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, had done in many other countries. The world Jewish community was to fund the settlements and supply the settlers.
History
Before World War II
Small groups of Baghdadi and Russian Jewish merchants are known to have resided in Japan since at least the Perry Expedition in the middle of the 19th century, with one Jew even being named Honorary Consul of Japan to Australia.:175 By 1884, a Jewish community existed in Nagasaki with a synagogue of their own; by 1904 the city was home to one hundred Jewish families. The Jewish community in Yokohama was also sizable at the time, providing accommodation for refugees from Imperial Russia.:162–165The idea for a population to be established in Manchukuo and help build Japan's industry and infrastructure there was advanced by a small group whose primary members included Captain Koreshige Inuzuka and Captain Norihiro Yasue, who became known as "Jewish experts", the 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 were wealthy and had considerable political influence. Jacob Schiff, a Jewish-American banker who, thirty years earlier, offered sizable loans to the Japanese government which helped it win the Russo-Japanese War, was well known. After the war, he attended a personal audience with Emperor Meiji and became the first foreigner to be awarded the Order of the Rising Sun.:176 As a possible sign of gratitude, the Japanese ambassador to the United States, petitioned by the American Jewish community, guaranteed the humane treatment of Jewish prisoners captured during the war.:163 In addition, a Japanese translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion 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. However, this was not always the case. Anti-Semitic sentiments were first introduced to Japan following Russia's 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and civil war. Through the cooperation and communication of Japanese and White Army officers, the Jewry and the Bolsheviks became synonymous for the former as symbols of revolution and a threat to imperial rule.176–178 In the following decade, European literature on the Jews, including both scientific and antisemitic works, first reached Southeast Asia. The Japanese public, only having access to a limited volume of information on the world's Jewry and often unable to differentiate between accurate and sensationalized sources, developed an exoticized and exaggerated image of the Jewish people.168–170
In 1922, ultranationalist officers Yasue and Inuzuka had returned from the Japanese Siberian Intervention, aiding the White Russians against the Red Army where they first learned of the Protocols and came to be fascinated by the alleged powers of the Jewish people. This led them to conclude that, while posing a significant threat to the Japanese Empire, the Jewish people could be allied with, whereupon they could use their immense influence on the world stage to assist Japan in resolving its economic and social issues.:193–199 Over the course of the 1920s, they wrote many reports on the Jews, and traveled to the British Mandate of Palestine to research the subject and speak with Jewish leaders such as 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. Many reports were received but none proved the existence of a global conspiracy.
In 1931, the officers joined forces to an extent with the Manchurian faction and a number of Japanese military officials who pushed for Japanese expansion into Manchuria, led by Colonel Seishirō Itagaki and Lieutenant-Colonel Kanji Ishiwara just before the Mukden Incident.
Of Harbin's one million population, Jews represented only a tiny fraction. Their numbers, as high as 13,000 in the 1920s, had halved by the mid-1930s in response to economic depression and after events relating to the kidnapping and murder of Simon Kaspé by a gang of Russian Fascists and criminals under the influence of Konstantin Rodzaevsky.
Although Russian Jews in Manchukuo were given legal status and protection, the half-hearted investigation into Kaspé's death by the Japanese authorities, who were attempting to court the White Russian community as local enforcers and for their Anti-Communist sentiments, led the Jews of Harbin to no longer trust the Japanese army. Many left for Shanghai, where the Jewish community had suffered no antisemitism, or deeper into China. In 1937, after Yasue spoke with Jewish leaders in Harbin, the Far Eastern Jewish Council was established by Abraham Kaufman, and over the next several years, many meetings were held to discuss the idea of encouraging and establishing Jewish settlements in and around Harbin.
In March 1938, Lieutenant General Kiichiro Higuchi of the Imperial Japanese Army proposed the reception of some Jewish refugees from Russia to General Hideki Tojo. Despite German protests, Tojo approved and had Manchuria, then a puppet state of Japan, admit them.
On December 6, 1938, Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, Foreign Minister Hachirō Arita, Army Minister Seishirō Itagaki, Naval Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, and Finance Minister Shigeaki Ikeda met to discuss the dilemma at the "Five Ministers' Conference". They made a decision of prohibiting the expulsion of the Jews in Japan, Manchuria, and China. 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.
As an immediate result of the Five Ministers' Conference, 14,000–15,000 Eastern European Jews were granted asylum in the Japanese quarter of Shanghai; the European quarters, in contrast, admitted almost no Jews. 1000 Polish refugees who had not been able to obtain visas for any country were also given asylum in Shanghai.
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 was not adopted officially. 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 influential members of the American Jewish community at the time and Zionist activist, expressed a strong opinion against any Jewish–Japanese cooperation.