Warum Japan keine Juden verfolgte: Die Judenpolitik des Kaiserreiches Japan während der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus (1933–1945) (review)

The Japanese treatment of Jews during the 1930s and during World War II in the Pacific is a topic that has been only marginally explored by English-language scholars working on Japan. In 1979 Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz published The Fugu Plan: The Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews during World War Two (Paddington Press). Despite its importance, this book did not receive widespread attention from the scholarly community until it was republished in 1996. The Fugu Plan book represented the first full-fledged effort to deal with Japanese-Jewish relations during the war and focused on the startling idea developed by a number of Japanese (including members of the army and navy) to create a Jewish “homeland” in Manchuria. The men involved in the plan often referred to it by the name of the poisonous blowfish, which if properly prepared became a great delicacy but in the hands of an incompetent chef could go on to kill his customer.

Subsequent works included David Kranzler’s Japanese, Nazis and Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai, 1938–1945 (KTAV Publishing House, 1988) and Ben-Ami Shillony’s The Jews and the Japanese: The Successful Outsiders (Charles E. Tuttle, 1991). In 1996, the year the Tokayer and Swartz volume was republished, Hillel Levine took up the life of Sugihara Chiune, the Japanese diplomat in Kovno, Lithuania, who wrote thousands of transit visas for Jews to exit Europe through Japan. Sugihara had first come to light in Tokayer and Swartz’s volume and in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993).¹ Levine’s book was titled The Search for Sugihara: The Elusive Japanese Diplomat Who Risked His Life to Rescue 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust (Free Press, 1996).

The volume under review by Heinz Eberhard Maul builds on many of these earlier works and on a number of new German and Japanese studies. It gives a comprehensive overview of Japanese-Jewish relations during the crucial decade leading to and including the Pacific War. I agree with Michael Blumenthal, the director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, that Maul has written an “important book” in which his careful research into the Japanese-Jewish situation explains clearly the “contradictory Japanese attitude toward the Jews and its historical sources” (p. 7). The book also shows us why, despite their concerted efforts to get the Japanese to join them as partners in their pursuit of the “final solution” for all Jews, the Nazis, including the Gestapo “Butcher of Warsaw,” Josef Meisinger, failed to enlist full Japanese support.

Japan’s policy toward the Jews, as Maul shows us, was often a strange mixture of pragmatism and self-interest, idealism and realpolitik. In many instances there was a curious naiveté about Japanese fears and hopes for the Jews. Japanese leaders, including those within the army and navy, constantly oscillated between two poles: the desire to use Jews and Jewish capital to develop Manchuria and the empire (thus the homeland idea), and their fear that a Jewish conspiracy (per The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion²) would eventually seize power and threaten Japan. At both poles, hopes and fears were entirely unrealistic. Japanese expectations that the friendly treatment of Jews would help to build the empire and shore up Japanese-American relations by influencing the Jews of America was doomed to failure as Japan pursued its expansionist policies of confrontation in China and Southeast Asia. At the same time, Japan’s treaty entanglements with Nazi Germany in 1936, 1938, and 1940 created an increasingly difficult environment in which to openly adopt a pro-Jewish policy either on the question of Jewish emigration through Japan or the creation of a friendly Jewish settlement in Manchuria (or later Shanghai). Japanese “pragmatism” was seriously flawed by a lack of realism.

Maul divides the development of Japan’s...