Intended Policy or Haphazard Measures

An overall examination of the fate of the small Jewish communities in the empire the Japanese created beginning in 1931, numbering a total of some thirty-five to forty thousand Jews who were lucky compared to their breth-ren who were exterminated in Europe, raises several questions as to the nature of Japan’s policy regarding the Jews in the areas under its occupa-tion. Among the questions are: did Japan have a clear-cut policy towards the Jews, and if so, why did Japan display a relatively tolerant and lenient attitude toward most of the Jews under its control rather than cave in to Nazi demands? Did Nazi Germany press Japan to take sterner measures against the Jews under its control, and if so, what were those measures and why did Japan basically ignore them? Why didn’t the Japanese occu-pation authorities as a rule separate the Jews from the rest of the Western population who fell to them?

Documentary evidence and the testimonies of some Japanese offi-cers involved in occupation policies show that Japan’s policy toward the Jews in general and their attitude toward the Jewish communities in the areas under their occupation in specific were not haphazard but rather the result of a well thought-out policy stating that Japan must avoid being dragged into following the German path of antisemitism and must ignore Nazi demands regarding the Jews. The motives that influenced this policy were rooted in the broad spectrum of Japan’s wartime strategy and its world outlook, which was based occasionally on prejudices and biases—some of them racist.

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Jews in the Japanese - Occupied Territories during the War Years

One fact that may help explain why Japan did not pursue the Nazi policy of the Final Solution is the absence of political, economic, or military cooperation between Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany during the war.

The September 1940 Axis Pact spoke in broad terms of dividing the world into two spheres of interest: Germany would have a free hand in Europe while Japan would have the same in the Eastern and South East Asia. In late 1940 and early 1941, Germany began to press Japan to attack British possessions in South East Asia, mainly Singapore, to relieve the pressure on Germany in North Africa and the Middle East. Japan declined. Germany’s repeated demands after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, to attack the Soviet Union in Siberia were ignored. Japan also refused to enter the war against the Soviet Union in 1943, when German forces were already in a massive retreat after their defeat in Stalingrad. Instead, Japan sought to mediate between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to end the war on the eastern front. Probably one direct consequence of the Japan-Soviet Union Non-Aggression Pact of April 1941 was the Japanese policy of refraining from harming Russian Jews, whether they were Soviet citizens or stateless, in any way. The absence of close cooperation between Japan and Germany on the critical issue of opening a second front against the Soviet Union in Siberia turned the Axis Alliance into a purely declarative arrangement. This fact influenced very much the freedom of action Japan had on an issue far less important from their point of view: what to do with the Jews in the areas under their control.

Another matter was the fact that Jews did not play any role in local politics or the media or academia in the former Western colonies. There was also hardly any anti-Japanese underground in these colonies, or gue-rilla warfare waged against the Japanese. This was quite different from the situation in Europe, where Jews were involved in the various underground and partisan movements against the Nazi occupation, especially in France, Poland, and Yugoslavia, where a number of Jews held leadership positions in underground communist parties. In Asia, apart from David Marshall in Singapore, Jews played no role in the emerging national liberation move-ments in India, Indonesia, Indo-China, Burma, Malaya, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies. They were involved in trade, and a few were very wealthy, mainly in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai. Jews were not involved at all in the communist movements in China or South East Asia.

The majority of them were prepared to cooperate with the Japanese occu-pation authorities not because of any sympathy toward Japan, but simply in order to survive. They also saw that the Western colonial powers were

not prepared to defend themselves with force against the invading Japanese and surrendered their colonies to Japan in the early stages of the war, and may have wondered why the Jews should be the only ones in the European population to fight the Japanese.

On those occasions that Jews under Japanese occupation did fall victim to antisemitism, it was often derived from other Europeans: British, French, Dutch, and mainly White Russian émigrés.

It is reasonable to believe that Japan’s attitude toward the Jews during the war was the result of a great deal of ignorance regarding them. The majority of the Japanese troops and their officers did not have any knowl-edge about the Jews, and few were tainted by antisemitism. There are testi-monies that some Japanese commandants of internment camps on occasion humiliated Jews, claiming that Churchill and Roosevelt were Jewish. There were also cases of torture, flogging, and incarceration in isolation cells, but it appears that as a rule Japan’s attitude toward the Jews was no different from its attitude toward other Europeans. There were no specific directives from Tokyo on how to deal with the Jews apart from the February 1942 guidelines, which as we discussed stated that Jews were to be treated like other enemy aliens, although special attention and surveillance would be applied to them. This directive did not smack of antisemitic bias.

Furthermore, in the territories occupied by Japan during the war, there was no visible or influential German or Nazi presence—apart from in Shanghai, as was already mentioned. It seems that the German commu-nities in East and South East Asia were not that interested in the fate of the Jews. The absence of such a presence and pressures meant that the German government, in the form of its diplomatic representatives in various cities in Asia could not make demands on the Japanese concerning their treatment of Jews. True, several demands were made in Tokyo, but Japan basically chose to ignore them, and the Germans had no ability to enforce them.

Perhaps someone in Tokyo was concerned over what would happen if they heeded the German demands and handed over Jews to them. This would cause a major logistical problem. It would mean concentrating the Jews in certain areas, separated from other Europeans, in order to transport them to German merchant vessels, necessary since Japan was already short of ships. Beginning in the latter part of 1942, the United States navy began to wage a very successful submarine war against the Japanese merchant marine, and the Japanese government could not spare ships to send thou-sands of Jews to Germany. Using the Trans-Siberian Railway was, of course, out of the question.

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Jews in the Japanese - Occupied Territories during the War Years

It is likely that from the end of 1942, the idea that Japan was going to lose the war began to permeate the mind of key Japanese leaders, both civilians and military. Many started wondering how they would clear their names in case they were put on trial as war criminals. If they weren’t care-ful, they would be accused of ill-treatment of civilians and of persecuting the Jews in addition to committing crimes against prisoners of war. Since the idea that Jews controlled the world, particularly the Western democ-racies, was quite prevalent in Japan before and during the war, some may have thought it would be foolish to add to their list of crimes that of harm-ing the Jews.

As we shall see, the general atmosphere in the Japanese home islands during the war, despite the several hundred antisemitic articles and other publications that appeared, was such that the “Jewish Question” was almost non-existent in the agenda and thought of the average Japanese person.

They were increasingly concerned with surviving the war, a factor that became critical after the fall of Saipan in July 1944. What to do with the Jews, therefore, was at best a marginal issue, never a central one in Japan.

Could the Jews under Japanese occupation have been rescued from their misery had they been sent to other countries? The answer to this question is probably no. America, Britain, and the British Commonwealth of Nations were at war against Japan and could not spare the means and funds to transport several thousand Jews from East and South East Asia to safe places. Even if they had considered doing so, how would they do it, and where would they send the Jews? Even before the outbreak of the Pacific War, Britain informed the government of Japan that it should not issue transit visas to Japan for Jews who claimed they were traveling to Palestine.

This was in line with the May 1939 White Paper regulations, which in effect closed Palestine to Jewish immigration. If the Western allies were not pre-pared to open their gates to fleeing Jews, let alone to bomb Auschwitz or the railway lines leading there or to other death camps, how could anyone expect the Japanese to do anything to save Jews in Asia? Russia could not offer any help, either—and in any case, would Russian Jews under Japanese control be ready to return to the country from which they escaped?

The only neutral countries that could have done anything were Sweden, Portugal, Spain, and Mexico. Even if we assume that they would be ready to help, how could Jews under Japanese control travel to any of them during the war?

It is important to keep in mind that many Japanese felt, and some con-tinue to feel, that Jews control the world and especially the United States,

and that their international contacts can produce miracles. This can be demonstrated particularly by the fact that in January 1945, the leaders of the Tianjin Jewish community, mostly Russian Jews, were invited to Beijing for a meeting with a senior Japanese officer, Colonel Hidaka Tomoki. After dis-cussing with them the horrors of the war and the huge number of Japanese, Jewish, and American casualties, he added that it was well known that the Jews had enormous influence on the American government. Therefore, he requested that the Jewish leaders of Tianjin ask their American counter-parts to persuade their government to end the war on honorable terms.

He also reminded them of Japan’s decent treatment of the Jews in its terri-tories. One of the Jewish leaders came up with an interesting argument. He said that he was prepared to do so, but warned the Japanese officer that if word of this project got out and Japan’s desperate situation became known, it would only intensify America’s efforts to defeat Japan.

It is not clear whether the request was a personal initiative of Colonel Hidaka or whether he carried out orders from above. Those were the days when Japanese diplomats and some military officers were desperately trying to seek mainly Soviet, but also Swedish, and Swiss mediation to end the war. It is interesting that Hidaka’s request, based on the historically cor-rect fact that Japan did not go out of its way to harm the forty thousand Jews in its territories, was also based on an almost naïve assumption about the power and influence of international Jewry, a classic antisemitic motive.

Chapter 10