Japan planned Jewish state in north China

Press, 16 June 1979, Page 14

Japan planned Jewish state in north China

From a special correspondent in New

Newly translated secret documents of the Japanese Foreign Ministry and interviews with former high Tokyo officials disclose that a plan existed, in the years before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbour, to enlist skills and financial resources of persecuted Jews in Europe, ,to rescue them from the Nazis, and to establish an “Israel” in Japan’s conquered territory of Manchuria, in northe'm China. Japanese military leaders and industrialists devised in 1934 what came to be known as the “Fugu Plan.” Its initial goal was to invite 50,000 German Jews to settle in Manchukuo, as the Japanese called Manchuria. The 50,000 Jews were to serve as a vanguard for as many as a million. Under the plant, the Jews were to build the wilderness region into an independent state, turn it into a buffer against the Soviet Union, and attract American sympathy and investments, thereby strengthening what was called Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The plan’s name derived from the fugu — the Japanese blowfish containing a poison that • must be removed before the fish can be eaten. At one meeting of “Jewish experts’" in Tokyo, as reported in the documents, a Japanese naval officer observed: “If we are ever alert to the sly nature of the Jews, if we succeed in our undertaking, We will create for our nation and our beloved Emperor the tastiest and most nutritious dish imaginable.” These previously undisclosed details appear in a

book being published this year titled “The Fugu Plan: The Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews During World War II.” The publisher is Paddington Press, an Americanowned house based in Britain. The authors are Marvin Tokayer, a rabbi w’ho served as a United States Air Force chaplain in Japan in 1962-64 and later returned there as rabbi of the Jewish community from 1968 to 1976, and Mary Sagmaster Swartz, a writer who lived and studied in Tokyo four years. In an interview, Rabbi Tokayer said that his disclosures about the plan were based on discussions with Japanese originators, their widows or children, recollections by Jews who lived in the Orient during the war and military and diplomatic documents. Some of these documents, untranslated, are in the American National Archives and the Library of Congress. The Japanese leadership had little knowledge of the Jewish people and their religion and had little prejudice toward them. While one faction was genuinely motivated by humanitarian considerations, another had learned about the Jews from the forged anti-Semitic “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” All the advocates of the plan had exaggerated views of Jews’ influence in the United States, the Soviet Union and Western Europe. The mixture of awe and fear was fanned by propaganda from Nazi Germany. In November, 1938. Japan and Germany signed a cultural agreement. In spite of the rising power

of the Third Reich, in the summer of 1939 diplomatic and military sponsors of the plan, issued confidential reports that aimed at enlisting Jewish businessmen in China to sway public opinion in the United States in favour of Japanese expansion. One 90-page document, titled “The Study and Analysis of Introducing Jewish Capital,” was mainly devoted to the plan to establish a Jewish refugee settlement. The secret document spoke of “a truly peaceful land so that the Jews may be comfortably settled to engage in business at ease forever.” In the words of Colonel Norihiro Yasue, a backer of

the plan who was regarded as one of the most interested in the welfare of the refugees themselves, what was desired was the creation of an “Israel in Asia.” The documents disclose that a top-level Cabinet meeting was held in December. 1938, at which Finance and Commerce Minister, Mr Seishin Ikeda, explained rhe broad aims of the Fugu Plan in these words: “Dangerous or not. we need the Jews. The settlers themselves will be an asset to Manchukuo and Japan. As Ayukawasan has said. ‘No Japanese has ever made a good pair of shoes . . . but the Jewish shoemakers... ’ ”

Gisuke Ayukawa, one of the leading industrialists in prewar Japan, studied ironworking in the United States, returned to Japan and created the huge combine that would be known as Nissan Industries. Finance and Commerce Minister Ikeda continued: “Even more important, their settlement will encourage other Jews to release capital we cannot get any other wav. By simply welcoming these beleaguered Europeans, we will gain the affection of the American Jews who control the press, the broadcast media, the film industry and possibly President Roosevelt himself.

"We cannot afford to alienate the Jews. If Japan imitates Germany’s severe control of the Jews, discrimination will develop in connection with our foreign trade. On the other hand, if Japan goes in the opposite direction and befriends the Jews, entirely new economic possibilities will be open to us.” According to Rabbi Tokaver. the Fugu Plan sponsors looked for a signal of approval from leading Jewish figures. But war in Europe and growing tensions between Japan and the United States ruled out such a possibility.