Shiraishi Masaaki, the author of the 2015
Sugihara Chiune: Jōhō ni kaketa gaikōkan, has worked for more than three decades in the Diplomatic Archives of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His book has now been translated by Gaynor Sekimori, a research associate at the SOAS University of London Centre for the Study of Japanese Religions, and published in English as
Sugihara Chiune: The Duty and Humanity of an Intelligence Officer. The work, an objective analysis drawing on the telegrams and reports filed by Sugihara (1900–86) during his time in Kaunas, Lithuania, and Prague, then Czechoslovakia, paints a fuller picture of the diplomat whose “visas for life,” issued in 1940–41, offered a lifeline to thousands of Jewish refugees in Eastern Europe.
Sugihara Chiune: The Duty and Humanity of an Intelligence Officer, published in March this year as the English translation of a 2015 Japanese work, illuminates the life of the war-era Japanese diplomat who issued thousands of life-saving transit visas to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi horrors in Europe.