Yukiko Sugihara Views

• General Goods

When Sugihara served in the Manchurian Foreign Office, he took part in the negotiations with the Soviet Union concerning the Northern Manchurian Railroad. He quit his post as Deputy Foreign Minister in Manchuria in protest over Japanese mistreatment of the local Chinese. While in Harbin, he converted to Orthodox Christianity as “Pavlo Sergeivich Sugihara”[7] and married a Russian woman named Klaudia Semionova Apollonova. They divorced in 1935, before he returned to Japan, where he married Yukiko Kikuchi, who became Yukiko Sugihara (1913–2008) (杉原幸子 Sugihara Yukiko) after the marriage; they had four sons (Hiroki, Chiaki, Haruki, Nobuki). Nobuki is their only son still alive. Chiune Sugihara also served in the Information Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and as a translator for the Japanese legation in Helsinki, Finland.[3]

Sugihara served as a Consul General in Prague, Czechoslovakia, from March 1941 to late 1942 in Königsberg, East Prussia and in the legation in Bucharest, Romania from 1942 to 1944. When Soviet troops entered Romania, they imprisoned Sugihara and his family in a POW camp for eighteen months. They were released in 1946 and returned to Japan through the Soviet Union via the Trans-Siberian railroad and Nakhodka port. In 1947, the Japanese foreign office asked him to resign, nominally due to downsizing. Some sources, including his wife Yukiko Sugihara, have said that the Foreign Ministry told Sugihara he was dismissed because of that incident in Lithuania.[5][8]

Inspired by “Lamentations, a book of the Old Testament, written by Jeremiah” which “suddenly came to [her] mind”, Yukiko Sugihara urged Chiune to issue visas to save Jewish refugees. When asked by Moshe Zupnik why he risked his career to save other people, he said simplya : I do it just because I have pity on the people. They want to get out so I let them have the visas. [4]

Chiune 'Sempo' Sugihara was the Japanese Consul General in Kovno, Lithuania in 1939 and 1940. When World War II broke out, Consul Sugihara's office was flooded with visa requests from thousands of Jews fleeing German-occupied Poland. With the encouragement of his wife Yukiko, Sugihara issued Japanese transit visas to as many as 6,000 Polish Jews.