The main difficulty arose regarding Jewish refugees from Europe, who came to Japan in a quest for shelter from Nazi persecution. Japan was committed to seeking an alliance with Germany, but the Axis alliance made no refer-ence to Jews, and therefore each case was dealt with on an individual basis.
As most of the Jewish refugees who made their way to Japan and Shanghai arrived before that pact was signed on September 28, 1940, the government of Japan decided to adopt a pragmatic, flexible, and non-dogmatic policy toward Jews, although the German embassy in Tokyo and German foreign ministry officials in Berlin often requested that they deal harshly with Jews.
One example of Japan’s refusal to go along with the German attitude to Jews was its granting approval to the Nippon-Columbia Records Company, an
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offshoot of the American Columbia Records, which wished to retain the long list of Jewish performers on its record label. The German embassy in Tokyo presented the Japanese government with a list that included leading Jewish musicians such as violinists Mischa Elman, Bronislav Huberman, Yehudi Menuhin, Szimon Goldberg, Yasha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, Joseph Szigeti, and Efrem Zimbalist and requested that they be dropped from the circulation list, and that their records not be sold in Japan. Another demand Nazi Germany made of Japan was that Jewish musicians should not be employed by Japanese orchestras. The demand related specifically to the Krakow-born conductor Joseph Rosenstock (1895-1985) and Klaus Pringsheim, the Jewish brother-in-law of the famous author Thomas Mann.
Rosenstock was a well-known conductor in Berlin until he was dismissed by the Nazis shortly after they came to power in 1933. He was appointed conductor of the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra in 1936, and told journalists that the Nazis were lowering the level of music in Germany. This assertion resulted in a complaint by the German embassy in Tokyo, which led the Japanese government to formulate the following reply quoted by Professor Ben-Ami Shillony in his book on Japan and the Jews: “It is well known that the attitude of the Japanese public to Jews totally differs from the official German position, and there are even groups in Japan which sympathize with Jewish refugees. Our government cannot do anything that might be interpreted as supporting racial discrimination or taking a position against the Jews.”2
When the issue of establishing a new orchestra, founded by the Victor Record Company and supported by a leading Japanese company called Tokyo Electric, arose, Rosenstock and Pringsheim were both considered for the post of conductor. Neither received the position; the orchestra founders even-tually settled on Manfred Gorlitt, a German musician of Jewish origins—
although he was able to get a confirmation that only his great-grandfather had been Jewish and Gorlitt himself had even been baptized. Gorlitt left Germany in the late 1930’s because he could not find a position despite being a member of the Nazi party. He began to conduct the new orchestra in Tokyo in January 1940. Three years later he was removed due to pressure from radical Japanese groups who demanded the position be given to a Japanese musician and not to a foreigner, even if he was German.
Klaus Pringsheim fared better, despite the fact that he was an admitted Jew. He had studied music in Vienna under Gustav Mahler and was a con-ductor, composer, and teacher. He was lucky enough to have left Germany in 1931, and between 1941 and 1946 was the conductor of the Japan Chamber
Orchestra. He was only interned—in a camp called Tokyo-Koishikawa near the resort town of Karuizawa—during the final months of the war, along with another Jewish musician, the Russian-born pianist Leonid Kreutzer, who had taught at the Tokyo Music Academy. Other Jewish teachers in this academy included violinist Alexander Mogilevsky and pianist Leo Sirotta (1885-1965). The Ukranian-born Sirota arrived in Japan in 1929 for a six-month visit, during which he taught in the Tokyo Academy of Music and was asked to stay on. He remained in Japan until after the end of the war, and continued to be a very popular piano teacher. In 1939 he sent his daughter Beate to Mills College in California. She returned in 1945, and as she spoke fluent Japanese she soon joined the government section of the occupation authorities and was very influential in the drafting of the paragraphs deal-ing with women’s equality in the 1947 MacArthur Constitution. Another well-known Jewish musician in Japan was singer Margaret Netzke-Lowe.
Part of the reason Japan allowed these people to continue with their activities had to do with the love of many influential Japanese people for European classical music, the absence of other well-known foreign musi-cians who were ready to work in Japan, and most of all the high artistic level of these musicians. The Japanese authorities did not pay much attention to musicians’ origins or religious affiliations, and in any case the Jewish musi-cians did not advertise their religion or openly practice it. The Japanese interior ministry officials were apparently satisfied that these musicians, some of whom held German, Austrian, or even Russian passports, were nationals of friendly countries. They ignored the German government’s cancellation of the citizenship of its Jews in 1941 and the fact that this ren-dered the German-Jewish musicians stateless. During the war, the German embassy in Tokyo sent a note to the Japanese foreign ministry listing German musicians active in Japan. They were divided into three categories:
German musicians who were German citizens resident in Japan; German musicians resident in Japan who had lost their German nationality; and musicians who were German citizens, but in whom the embassy had no interest. The last category included the Jews. The Japanese government apparently preferred to ignore the list.
Most of the Jewish refugees who made it to Japan ended up in Kobe, where the local Jewish community made a commitment to the Japanese authorities that it would be responsible for the new arrivals’ wellbeing and that the refugees would not be a burden on Japan. However, being a tiny community, it did not have the necessary means to care for them all and appealed frequently to the Joint Distribution Committee in New York.
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The archives of the JDC are replete with frantic cables from Jewcom (the cable name of the Kobe community) asking for funds, which were sent. At some point the Kobe Jews could no longer bear the burden, and suggested that the refugees be transferred to Shanghai. The Japanese government agreed, so did the Jewish refugees, and thus began the movement of thou-sands of Jews from Kobe to Shanghai even before Pearl Harbor.