The history of the Jews in Japan is well documented in modern times with various traditions relating
to much earlier eras. Status of Jews in Japan
Jews and their culture are by far one of the most minor ethnic and religious groups in
Japan, presently consisting of only about from 300 to 2,000 people or about from 0.0016%
to about 0.0002% of Japan's total population. Almost all of them are not Japanese citizens
and almost all of them are foreigner short-term residents.
Jewish history in Japan Early Jewish settlements in Japan
In 1572, Spanish Neapolitan Jews who had converted to Christianity to escape, entered Nagasaki
on Black Ships from Portuguese Macau. Remaining in Nagasaki, some of them reverted to Judaism,
even reclaiming their family names .
In 1586, the community, then consisting of at least three permanent families, was displaced
by the Shimazu forces. The Jews of Settsu absorbed some of them into its own community
, while a minority left or died.
Jewish settlements in Edo Japan Between 1848 and 1854, in Naha, Satsuma province,
Bernard Jean Bettelheim , a Jewish British national resided with his family. There is
a plaque at Gokokuji Jinja .
In 1861, Pogrom refugees from Russia and Poland moved to the port of Nagasaki; these were
the first Jews in Nagasaki since around 1584.
In 1867, over one week the Settsu Jewish community was pushed near extinction, disappearing altogether
after the Meiji restoration.
Towards the end of the Edo period, with the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry following
the Convention of Kanagawa and the end of Japan's "closed-door" foreign policy, Jewish
families again began to settle in Japan. The first recorded Jewish settlers arrived at
Yokohama in 1861. By 1895, this community, which by then consisted of about 50 families,
established the first synagogue in Meiji Japan. Part of this community would later move to
Kobe after the great Kanto earthquake of 1923.
Another early Jewish settlement was established in the 1880s in Nagasaki, a large Japanese
port city opened to foreign trade by the Portuguese. This community was larger than the one in
Yokohama, consisting of more than 100 families. It was here that the Beth Israel Synagogue
was created in 1894. The settlement would continually grow and remain active until it
eventually declined by the Russo-Japanese War in the early 20th century. The community's
Torah scroll would eventually be passed down to the Jews of Kobe, a group formed of freed
Russian Jewish war prisoners that had participated in the Czar's army and the Russian Revolution
of 1905.
View of Beth Israel Synagogue in Nagasaki From the mid 1920s until the 1950s, the Kobe
Jewish community was the largest Jewish community in Japan, formed by hundreds of Jews arriving
from Russia , the Middle East , as well as from Central and Eastern European countries
. It had both an Ashkenazi and a Sephardic synagogue. During this time, Tokyo's Jewish
community was slowly growing with the arrival of Jews from the United States, Western Europe
and Russia.
Jewish settlement in Imperial Japan In 1905, at the end of the Russo-Japanese
War, the community of Nagasaki went extinct. While the Iraqi community is formed in Kobe
Following Russia's 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, anti-Semitism exploded in Japan, with many
blaming Jews as being the "nature" of the revolution.
Some Japanese leaders, such as Captain Inuzuka Koreshige , Colonel Yasue Norihiro and industrialist
Aikawa Yoshisuke , came to believe that Jewish economic and political power could be harnessed
by Japan through controlled immigration and that such a policy would also ensure favor
from the United States through the influence of American Jewry. Although efforts were made
to attract Jewish investment and immigrants, the plan was limited by the government's desire
not to interfere with its alliance with Nazi Germany. Ultimately, it was left up to the
world Jewish community to fund the settlements and to supply settlers and the plan failed
to attract a significant long-term population or create the strategic benefits for Japan
that had been expected by its originators. In 1937, Japan invaded China, with the Japanese
ambassador to France telling the ruling Japanese that "English, American, and French Jewish
plutocrats" were leading opposition to the invasion.
On December 6, 1938, Five ministers council , which was the highest decision-making council,
made a decision of prohibiting the expulsion of the Jews in Japan. With the signing of
the German-Japanese Anti-COMINTERN Pact in 1936 and the Tripartite Treaty of September
1940, however, anti-Semitism gained a more formal footing in some of Tokyo's ruling circles.
Meanwhile, the Japanese public was exposed to a campaign of defamation that created a
popular image known as the Yudayaka, or the "Jewish peril."
During World War II, Japan was regarded by some as a safe refuge from the Holocaust,
despite being a part of the Axis and an ally of Germany. Jews trying to escape German-occupied
Poland could not pass the blockades near the Soviet Union and the Mediterranean Sea and
were forced to go through the neutral country of Lithuania . Of those who arrived, many
were sent to the Dutch West Indies with so-called Curaçao visas issued by the Dutch consul
Jan Zwartendijk, and Japanese visas issued by Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul to
Lithuania. Zwartendijk went against Dutch consular guidelines, and Sugihara ignored
his orders and gave thousands of Jews entry visas to Japan, risking his career. Together,
both consuls saved more than 6,000 lives.
Sugihara is said to have cooperated with Polish intelligence, as part of a bigger Japanese-Polish
cooperative plan. They managed to flee across the vast territory of Russia by train to Vladivostok
and then by boat to Kobe in Japan. The refugees – 2,185 in number – arrived in Japan from
August 1940 to June 1941. Tadeusz Romer, the Polish ambassador in Tokyo, had managed to
get transit visas in Japan; asylum visas to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Burma;
immigration certificates to Palestine; and immigrant visas to the United States and some
Latin American countries.
Most Jews were permitted and encouraged to move on from Japan to the Shanghai Ghetto,
China, under Japanese occupation for the duration of World War II. Finally, Tadeusz Romer arrived
in Shanghai on November 1, 1941, to continue the action for Jewish refugees. Among those
saved in the Shanghai Ghetto were leaders and students of Mir yeshiva, the only European
yeshiva to survive the Holocaust. They – some 400 in number – fled from Mir to Vilna with
the outbreak of World War II in 1939 and then to Keidan, Lithuania. In late 1940, they obtained
visas from Chiune Sugihara, to travel from Keidan via Siberia and Vladivostok to Kobe,
Japan. By November 1941, the Japanese moved this group and most of others on to the Shanghai
Ghetto in order to consolidate the Jews under their control.
The secretary of the Manchurian Legation in Berlin Wang Tifu also issued visas to 12,000
refugees, including Jews, from June 1939 to May 1940.
Throughout the war, the Japanese government continually rejected some requests from the
German government to establish anti-Semitic policies. However, some Jews who resided in
Japanese-occupied territories were interned in detention camps in Malaysia and the Netherlands
East Indies. Jews in the Philippines were also faced accusations of being involved in
black market operations, price manipulation, and espionage. Towards the end, Nazi representatives
pressured the Japanese army to devise a plan to exterminate Shanghai's Jewish population
and this pressure eventually became known to the Jewish community's leadership. However,
the Japanese had no intention of further provoking the anger of the Allies and thus delayed the
German request for a time, eventually rejecting it entirely. One Orthodox Jewish institution
saved in this manner was the Lithuanian Haredi Mir yeshiva. The Japanese government and people
offered the Jews temporary shelter, medical services, food, transportation, and gifts,
but preferred that they move on to reside in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.
The decision to declare the Shanghai Ghetto in February 1943 was influenced by the police
attaché of the German embassy in Tokyo, Josef Meisinger. In autumn 1942 he had lengthy discussions
with the Japanese Home Ministry. Because the Japanese were mostly not anti-Semitic, he
used their espionage fear to provoke actions against the Jewish community. To the Japanese
he declared, that he was ordered from Berlin to provide them all names of "anti-Nazis"
among the German residents. Then he claimed that "anti-Nazis" were always "anti-Japanese"
and added that "anti-Nazis" were primarily German Jews, of whom 20,000 had emigrated
to Shanghai. Meisinger's anti-Semitic intrigue worked. In response to his statements, the
Japanese demanded from Meisinger a list of all "anti-Nazis". This list was, as Meisinger's
personal secretary later confirmed, already prepared. After consulting General Müller,
Meisinger handed the list over to the Japanese Home Ministry and the Kenpeitai at the end
of 1942. The list contained i. a. the names of all Jews with a German passport in Japan.
Karl Hamel, the interpreter of Meisinger, who was present at the discussions with the
Japanese authorities, later testified that this intervention led to a "real chasing of
anti-Nazis" and to the "internment of quite a lot of people". He added that "this thesis
may be regarded as the basic explanation of Mr. Meisinger’s activities in Japan with
regard to the splitting up of the German Community into Nazis and anti-Nazis." This testimony
of Karl Hamel to Allied interrogation specialists was kept strictly confidential for a long
time. During lawsuits for compensation of inmates of the Shanghai Ghetto in the 1950s,
former German diplomats were able to convince the judges, that the proclamation of the ghetto
was a sovereign act of the Japanese and not related to German authorities.
At war's end, about half of the Jews who had been in Japanese-controlled territories later
moved on to the Western hemisphere and the remainder moved to other parts of the world,
mainly to Israel.
Since the 1920s, there have been occasional events and statements reflecting antisemitism
in Japan, generally promoted by fringe elements and tabloid newspapers.
Jews and Judaism in modern Japan After World War II, a large portion of the
few Jews that were in Japan left, many going to what would become Israel. Some of those
who remained married locals and were assimilated into Japanese society.
Presently, there are several hundred Jewish families living in Tokyo, and a small number
of Jewish families in and around Kobe. A small number of Jewish expatriates of other countries
live throughout Japan, temporarily, for business, research, a gap year, or a variety of other
purposes.
There are always Jewish members of the United States Armed Forces serving on Okinawa and
in the other American military bases throughout Japan. Camp Foster in Okinawa has a dedicated
Jewish Chapel where the Jewish Community of Okinawa has been worshipping since the 1980s.
Okinawa has had a continuous presence of Rabbis, serving as military Chaplains, for the past
4 decades.
There are community centers serving Jewish communities in Tokyo and Kobe. The Chabad-Lubavitch
organization has two official centers in Tokyo and in Kobe and there is an additional Chabad
house run by Rabbi Yehezkel Binyomin Edery.
In the cultural domain, each year, hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews visit the Chiune
Sugihara Memorial Museum located in Yaotsu, Gifu Prefecture, in central Japan. Chiune
Sugihara's grave in Kamakura is the place where Jewish visitors pay their respect. Sugihara's
actions of issuing valid transit visas are thought to have saved the lives of around
6,000 Jews, who fled across Russia to Vladivostok and then Japan to escape the concentration
camps. In the same prefecture, many Jews also visit Takayama city.