Language:
English
Year of publication:
2022
Titel der Quelle:
The History of the Shanghai Jews
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2022) 75-96
Keywords:
Saneyoshi, Toshiro,
;
Jews History 20th century
;
Shanghai (China)
;
China Emigration and immigration 20th century
;
Government policy
;
History
;
Japan Biography Armed Forces
;
Officers
Abstract:
This chapter is based on recently discovered unpublished documents of the naval captain Toshiro Saneyoshi (1886–1973), who led the Special Investigation Department in the Japanese Naval Attaché’s Office in Shanghai from April 1942 to June 1943. Saneyoshi’s task was to settle Jewish issues properly in the post-Pearl Harbor context. His diaries, written in Japanese and in English, memoranda, and letters to his wife in Tokyo cover the complete range of his Department’s activities. Analysis of the documents clearly demonstrates that an egregious extermination plan of Shanghai Jewry elaborated by S. S. Colonel Josef Meisinger was a matter of rumor and the events in which Mitsugi Shibata (1910–1977), a non-regular employee of the Japanese Consulate General in Shanghai, was involved together with some Shanghai Jewish community leaders in the summer of 1942 occurred in a totally different way to that described in existing works, notably The Fugu Plan (1979) by Marvin Tokayer and Mary Schwartz. Jewish community leaders seriously tried to abort, not a fictional extermination plan of Meisinger, but a real initiative of forced relocation to a specific area. At the time, Saneyoshi was indeed pursuing this measure along with his two subordinates, Tsutomu Kubota (1895–1975) and Masahiko Sekiya (1904–1994). Furthermore, Saneyoshi’s documents enable a day-by-day description of the process of establishment of the Designated Area for Stateless Refugees, the so-called Shanghai ghetto (February 18, 1943) and corroborate the conclusion already reached in some previous research for the non-existence of interference by the Nazi authorities in the Japanese policy decision on Jewish affairs. It was on the initiative of Saneyoshi and his subordinate Tsutomu Kubota, later Chief Director of the Shanghai Office for Stateless Refugees, that the plan of the Designated Area was conceived, embodied, and executed, as they sought direction from the Naval General Staff Office and meticulously conferred with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Army, as well as the Ministry of Greater East Asia, newly formed on November 1, 1942.
DOI:
10.1007/978-3-031-13761-7_4
URL:
Locate this publication in Israeli libraries
Permalink
