Over the course of the war, the emperor, the prime minister, or most of Japan’s other government ministers never issued any statements referring specifically to Jews. Yet the authorities did allow some daily newspapers and important magazines to deal with the Jewish problem, and this was done in an antisemitic spirit that often resembled the notoriously antise-mitic German publication Der Sturmer. The media’s approach was to stress the dominant position of the Jews in Western democracies in order to intensify the anti-American and anti-British propaganda they were run-ning. Like in Germany, the Jews were accused of running the governments of the two greatest western democracies, and now Japan was portrayed as fighting not only the two Western powers but also the destructive influence of world Jewry. In a publication called A Citizen’s Guide to Assured Victory, the writer Tokutomi Ichiro (1863-1957) wrote that America had become a Jewish den. The American historian John Dower, whose monumental work War Without Mercy dealt with the demonization of America by the Japanese and vice versa, concluded that the anti-Jewish propaganda was not used to persecute the Jews but rather as part of the official propaganda intended to maintain high morale at home, to explain to the Japanese people why and against whom they were fighting, and to silence criticism by creating an artificial demonic enemy that all Japan must unite to fight. Other writers commented that while Germany was fighting against the Jews in Europe, Japan’s role was to wipe out any Jewish influence on the Asian continent.
It did not matter to the media figures writing on the topic that Jewish influence in Asia was virtually non-existent.
There is no evidence that Japan’s wartime leaders, from the emperor down to the prime minister, cabinet members, the heads of the armed
forces, were openly antisemitic, but it cannot be ignored that during the war years there were many expressions of antisemitic sentiments. Ben-Amy Shillony counted 170 antisemitic books and 472 articles in the same vein that appeared in Japan between 1936 and Japan’s surrender in August 1945. They contained arguments, for example, that since there was a Jewish dictatorship in England and the United States, Japan was bound to fight the Jews as well as those countries in order to rescue all of humanity. The mass circulation dailies Asahi Shimbun, Mainichi Shimbun, and Yomiuri Shimbun devoted some editorials to the Jewish problem and accused the Jews of being responsible for, among other crimes, the outbreak of the war. Mainichi even organized a symposium on the Jewish problem, called
“The Jewish Problem and the International Ideological War.” The keynote speaker was General Shioden Nobutaka, the leading antisemite among the top echelons of Japanese establishment. In March 1943, he arranged a series of lectures and exhibitions on “The Jews and International Secret Societies,” whose purpose was to prove that the Jews wielded vast control over Western democracies and that democracy itself was an ideological instrument in the hands of the Jews, assisting them in their aim of ruling the entire world. All the misfortunes of the universe, he insisted, were insti-gated by the crooked, devious, and venal Jews. Even the surrender of Italy in September 1943 was explained as part of a Jewish conspiracy. As the tide of war turned against Japan, antisemitism may have been used more to distract the public eye from the looming defeat than to express a true antisemitic ideology. Populism usually thrives at times of dire political, economic, social, and as was now the case in Japan, military crises. It is at such times that the public begins to lose confidence in its leaders and insti-tutions. The need to find scapegoats becomes strong, and during the latter part of the war this populist antisemitism touched the raw nerves of some Japanese people, linked emotionally with fears of the loss of sovereignty, foreign occupation, termination of the imperial system and the loss of the exalted value of kokutai (the Japanese entity and national essence). Populist antisemitism was aimed in fact at the urban working and middle class, and not at the majority of the Japanese population, which lived in rural areas.
It was intended to intensify the hatred of the “other” in order to justify the goals of the regime.
What was the impact of these articles and publications on the Japanese people? Since there were a mere several hundred Jews in Japan at the begin-ning of the war, and few were interned, anti-Jewish feelings and antisemi-tism had little meaning to the majority of the Japanese people, who began
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to sense in early 1943 that something had gone seriously wrong with the war. Since there were no visible Jews around, they could not vent their anger on them. The majority of the Japanese people began to be concerned with their own daily efforts to survive, and did not even accuse the Jews of playing a key role in the aerial bombardment of the home islands of Japan, which intensified in the summer of 1944 after the fall of Saipan and Tinian.
Nonetheless, anti-Jewish propaganda reached every home in Japan either via daily newspapers or through school textbooks. In one such volume, it was written that Churchill, Roosevelt, and even Chiang Kai Shek were puppets in the hands of the Jews, and that their strategy was devised by international secret societies of gamblers, speculators, international busi-nessmen, and industrialists. It stressed that Hitler and his associates were the saviors of humanity. Jews were also accused of causing the war between America and Japan. At this stage, Japan’s great appreciation for Jacob Schiff and the assistance he had given Japan during the Russo-Japanese War was conveniently forgotten.
Few of Japan’s wartime leaders shared these views. Standing out against them were two foreign ministers, Arita in 1939 and Matsuoka in 1940. They argued that at no time did the government of Japan make a commitment to Germany to enact its antisemitic policies in Japan or in territories occupied by Japan. In December of 1940, Matsuoka, who more than any one else among Japan’s leaders had pushed for Japan’s entry into the Axis alliance, told Lev Zykman, the Jewish businessman from Manchuria, that this neu-trality on the subject of the Jews was the position of Japan, and that its gov-ernment had no qualms stating so openly. Only twice during the war did the Japanese Diet discuss the matter of the appropriate attitude toward the Jews. In response to a question posed by the ultra-nationalist and leading antisemite General Shioden Nobutaka, who was re-elected to the Diet by an impressive majority in Tokyo in 1942, Education Minister Okabe Nagakage (1881-1970) replied that the policy of Japan toward the Jews was a matter of pragmatism and not ideology, and admitted that the government had not devoted sufficient time to studying the matter. The absence of official state-ments regarding the Jews could be seen as a signal to the Japanese people that the government was not party to populist antisemitism and that its policy at times contained elements of empathy towards the Jews.
Therefore, the Japanese government did not intern the approximately 900 Jews living in that country at the war’s beginning in concentration camps or hand them over to the Germans. There were several reasons for that. The first has already been mentioned: fear that if Japan were to be defeated, the
Jews would wreak vengeance. Second, the military, political, and economic cooperation between Japan and Germany was at best very loose, and in real-ity was nearly non-existent. Japan did not see any reason to respond to Nazi demands to deal with the Jews the way they did. Third, the construction of concentration camps would have embroiled the Japanese government in a logistical nightmare. With rare exceptions, Japan did not even use Jews as forced laborers as the Nazis did, although they did use American prisoners of war, Koreans, Indonesians, and others from their occupied territories for that purpose. Despite the fact that the United States interned some 120,000 Japanese-Americans for almost the entire duration of the war, Japan never considered interning the 900 Jews as a retaliatory act. At one point the idea of exchanging Shanghai Jews for Japanese Americans interned in America was mentioned, but it never got off the ground. There likely would have been some trouble with it: the Shanghai Jews would no doubt have loved to go to America, whereas the Japanese-Americans considered themselves entirely American, and few would have gone to Japan.
Even those few Jews, mainly musicians, whose removal the Germans did insist upon were too important for Japan to part with, and so its officials ignored the demands. Only in Shanghai did the Japanese government cave in to German ideas when they transferred some 5,000 Jews into a Jewish ghetto, but still neither handed them over to the Germans nor physically molested them. The Jewish community of Kobe continued to exist. The majority of the Jews in Tokyo and Yokohama survived the war and were alive and safe when Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945. It seems that Japan’s leaders did not want to appear to accept German dictates on the matter of race, particularly as Germany’s views of the Japanese race were not highly complimentary of them. They felt that they did not in any way owe Germany assistance in this matter. The easiest way to handle the awkward-ness was to simply ignore the repeated German government requests trans-mitted through the German Embassy in Tokyo, and those of the German foreign ministry to the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, Lieutenant General Oshima Hiroshi. The German government never admitted to Japan the nature of its Final Solution, or admit to Japanese diplomats the existence of the death camps and gas chambers. As already mentioned, no Jew in Japan was associated with the communist or socialist movement or belonged to any opposition group. The Japanese leadership was very careful not to engage in radical measures when it came to Jews, and preferred to treat them like other enemy aliens captured in the course of the war. To sum it up, it can be argued that during the war ultra-nationalism, anti-communism,
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and Pan-Asianism were far more important than antisemitism. To the extent that there were some Japanese antisemites, most of them viewed the Jews as communists. There was nothing in Shinto or Buddhist texts that dealt with Jews, let alone encouraged antisemitism, and there were no anti-Jewish pogroms in Japan or in the territories it controlled.