Jewish settlement in the Japanese Empire

The Fugu Plan (Japanese河豚 计画, Fugu keikaku ) was an idea of the Japanese Empire to the admission of Jewish refugees from Germany during the thirties of the twentieth century.

However, it should not be a pure charity action. They wanted to use the potential of Jewish intellectuals for the economic, technological and scientific recovery of the Japanese Empire, and possibly create contacts with wealthy Jewish businessmen in the Western world. The plan was never officially carried out by Japan on a large scale and was completely unrealistic, as you do not provoke Germany and the alliance did not want to gamble after the signing of the Tripartite Pact in 1940.

Initiators of this plan were the officers Inuzuka Koreshige and Yasue Norihiro. They had heard during their participation in the Russian Civil War of the so-called Protocols of Zion, and were fascinated by the alleged power of the Jewish circles. These officers were reading along with other colleagues and businessmen many more anti-Semitic publications and were later in Japan, ironically, as a specialist in Judaism. It matured the idea of ​​establishing a Jewish settlement on Japanese soil. The early thirties of the Fugu Plan was seriously considered for the first time by the Japanese government in consideration when you carried out the invasion of Manchuria. There was already a significant Jewish population, and the Japanese were wondering how you could possibly attract new Jewish settlers to expand the newly conquered territory. These considerations but were dropped, the Japanese army were as repression of the Imperial known against the Jewish residents in Harbin. A cooperation of these people with the Japanese for the next few years was thus excluded.

1938 there was a major conference with Japanese ministers and supporters of the Fugu Plan. Given the pogroms of November saw the time has come to do something, but you did not want to bring the growing relations with Germany in danger. The conference thus ended without a clear result. It has only been decided that all incoming in Japan Jewish refugees should be settled in Kobe. These refugees were later moved to the attack on Pearl Harbor to Shanghai and included at the insistence of the allied with Japan Germans in the Shanghai ghetto.

The German - Soviet non-aggression pact brought new difficulties for the transit of Jews to Japan. In Lithuania since the summer of 1940 occupies held by the Soviet Union, the Japanese Consul Sugihara Chiune exhibited without official permission from the Japanese government transit visas to Jewish refugees. These people could then travel to Vladivostok and embark after Tsuruga, if they had received an exit visa from the Soviet Union. Officially, these refugees would have had to travel further from Japan, but thousands of Jews could settle without problems in Kobe. As Germany 1941 raid launched on the Soviet Union, there was no ship traffic between Japan and the Soviet Union more so that the flow of refugees from the Siberian mainland came to a standstill. This was also the last unofficial highlight of the Fugu Plan. From 1942, every effort has been prohibited in this direction in order not to jeopardize the alliance with the other Axis powers by Government Decision.