Remembering Sugihara, Re-framing Japan in Europe: Holocaust Era Altruism and the Politics of Cultural Memory

Abstract

Cornell University This paper is a comparison of two museums dedicated to the Japanese diplomat toLithuania during World War II, Sugihara Chiune. Credited with having written over6,000 visas to save the lives of Jews fleeing German occupied Poland into Lithuania,Sugihara is regarded in Europe, in Japan, and within the Jewish community as awhole as an altruistic person.This study is not an inquiry into the merits of Sugihara's action, but rather astudy of how the process of memorializing, narrativizing and celebrating the life ofSugihara in two vastly different museums is part of a larger project of selectivecultural memory on the part of various Japanese organizations and institutions. Thispaper situates the themes of altruism and heroism in the larger process of culturalmemory, to see how such themes operate to advance other projects of collectivememory. The case of Sugihara is fascinating precisely because the vastly differingprocesses of cultural memory of the Holocaust―in Lithuania, in Japan, and in awider post-World War II, post Holocaust Jewish Diaspora each have different waysof constructing, disseminating and consuming narratives of altruism. This paper isbased on fieldwork in Kaunas and Vilnius, Lithuania, in 2003, 2004 and again in2005 and in Japan in 2005.