Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited his country's former consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania, on Sunday and honored a Japanese diplomat credited with saving an estimated 6,000 Jews from almost certain deaths in 1940.
Chiune Suhigara was serving as Japanese consul in Kaunas, then the capital of Lithuania, when he disobeyed his superiors and issued Japanese visas to Jews fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland, despite his country being a close ally of Nazi Germany.
Abe's visit to Lithuania, the first by a Japanese prime minister, comes as Japan seeks greater cooperation with countries such as China, a former adversary in World War II, in the face of rising tensions over North Korea's nuclear and missile programs.
"The courageous and humanitarian action of Mr. Sugihara provides us with guidance as to how to we should survive in this world, where rule-of-law-based international order is being challenged in various forms," Abe told reporters on Saturday.
After touring the former consulate and sitting at Sugihara's desk on Sunday, Abe said: "He worked far from Japan and in very difficult circumstances, but he had a strong belief as a Japanese diplomat and saved many Jewish people. I am really proud of him as Japanese."
Japan had several of its former leaders convicted and executed by an Allied tribunal as war criminals after the end of World War II.
Both China and South Korea have called on Japan to face up to its wartime past after Abe sent an offering to a shrine to war dead last August, on the anniversary of Japan's surrender.
Sugihara has been named as "Righteous among the Nations" by Israel's Yad Vashem museum. He is one of some 22,000 people honored for helping Jews in the Holocaust.
Sugihara issued thousands of Japanese transit visas to Jewish refugees, mostly from Poland, in July and August 1940, opening a route for them to escape through Russia to Japan. His diplomatic career was cut short after the war and his actions remained largely unknown in Japan for decades after the war ended.
Most of the local and refugee Jewish population in Lithuania – about 200,000 people – was murdered in the first few months after Nazi Germany occupied the country in June 1941, ending centuries of vibrant culture.
