The Fugu Plan or Fugu Plot (河豚計画 Fugu keikaku) was a scheme created in the 1930s in Japan, centered around the idea of settling Jewish refugees, escaping Nazi Europe, in Japan, to Japan's benefit. The Plan was first discussed in 1934, and solidified in 1938 at the Five Ministers' Conference, but the signing of the Tripartite Pact in 1941, along with a number of other events, prevented its full implementation. The plotters believed that the Jews could be quite beneficial to Japan, but also quite dangerous. Therefore, the plan was named after the Japanese delicacy "fugu", a puffer-fish whose poison can kill if the dish is not prepared exactly correctly.

The Plan

At its core, the Fugu Plan was a scheme to convince thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Jews to settle in Manchuria (or possibly Japan-held Shanghai), thus gaining not only the benefit of the mysterious economic prowess of the Jews, but also convincing America, specifically American Jewry, to grant their favor and investment to Japan.

The planners eventually came up with a detailed scheme, or rather, a set of options, for how the settlement would be organized, and how Jewish support, both in terms of investment and actual settlers, would be garnered. In June and July of 1939, these schemes, under long-winded names like "Concrete Measures to be Employed to Turn Friendly to Japan the Public Opinion Far East Diplomatic Policy Close Circle of President of USA by Manipulating Influential Jews in China," and "The Study and Analysis of Introducing Jewish Capital" came to be reviewed and approved by the top Japanese officials in China.

Methods of attracting both Jewish and American favor were offered, including the sending of a delegation to the US, to introduce American rabbis to the similarities between Judaism and Shinto, and to bring these rabbis back to Japan, to introduce them and their religion to the Japanese. Methods were also suggested for attracting the favor of American journalism and Hollywood, both believed by the planners to be heavily if not entirely controlled by Jews.

But the majority of the documents were devoted to the settlements. A number of sites in Manchuria were suggested, as well as areas near Shanghai. The plans allowed for the settler populations to range in size from 18,000 up to 600,000. Details of the land size of the settlement, as well as infrastructural arrangements, including schools, hospitals and the like were also detailed, for each level of population. It was agreed, by all the planners, that Jews in these settlements would be given complete freedom of religion, along with cultural and educational autonomy; while the Japanese were wary of giving the Jews too much freedom, they felt that some freedom would be necessary to maintain their favor, and their economic proficiencies. The officials asked to approve the plan insisted that, while the settlement was to appear autonomous, controls needed to be placed, behind the scenes, to keep the Jews under close watch and under control. They feared that the Jews might worm their way into the mainstream Japanese government and economy, taking command of it the way they, according to the Protocols, had done in many other countries.

Ultimately, however, the Plan left it up to the world Jewish community to fund the settlements, and to supply settlers.

History

The plan was originally the idea of a small group of Japanese government and military officials, who saw a need for a population to be established in Manchukuo (otherwise known as Manchuria), who could help build Japan's industry and infrastructure there. The primary members of this group included Captain Inuzuka Koreshige (犬塚 惟重) and Colonel Yasue Norihiro (安江 仙弘) who came to be known as the "Jewish experts," along with industrialist Aikawa Yoshisuke (鮎川 義介) and a number of officials in the Kwantung Army known as the Manchurian Faction.

Their decision to lure Jews to Manchukuo came from a belief that the Jewish people had a lot of money and political power, and an almost supernatural ability to gain those things. They knew of Jacob Schiff, a Jewish-American banker who, thirty years earlier, offered such a great loan to the Japanese government that it allowed them to win the Russo-Japanese War. In addition, they, along with a number of other Japanese officials, believed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document detailing the global Jewish conspiracy to control the world's economies and governments; this document has now long been proved totally false. Due to their belief in this document, they not only grossly overestimated the economic and political powers of the Jewish people, but also their interconnectedness across the world. They assumed that rescuing European Jews from the Nazis would gain unwavering and eternal favor for Japan from American Jewry.

In 1922, Yasue and Inukawa returned from their military service in Siberia, aiding the White Russians against the Communists. This is where they first learned of the Protocols, and came to be fascinated by the powers of the Jewish people. Over the course of the 1920s, they wrote many reports on the Jews, and traveled to Palestine, investigating further the Jewish people, and speaking with Jewish leaders Chaim Weizman and David Ben-Gurion. Yasue even translated the Protocols into Japanese. The pair managed to get the Foreign Ministry of Japan, or Gaimusho interested in the Jews. Every Japanese embassy and consulate was requested to keep the Ministry informed of the actions and movements of Jewish communities in their countries. Lots of reports came in, but none definitively proved the existence of a global conspiracy.

The so-called Jewish experts then joined forces, to an extent, with the 'Manchurian faction,' a number of Japanese military officials who wished to push for Japanese expansion into Manchuria. The faction was headed by Colonel Itagaki Seishiro (板垣 征四郎) and Lieutenant-Colonel Ishiwara Kanji (石原 莞爾). They were having trouble attracting Japanese settlers or investment into Manchuria, and it is quite possible that this is when the first seeds of the fugu plan were planted in the minds of its plotters-to-be. This was in 1931, just before the Mukden Incident which began the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Unfortunately for the Jewish experts, a large part of the already significant Jewish population of the Manchurian city of Harbin fled two years later, after the kidnapping, torture, and murder of Simon Kaspe ; the Jews of Harbin could no longer trust the Japanese army, and so they fled to Shanghai, or deeper into Shanghai, telling others of the horrors they were fleeing from. The fugu plan hit its first major obstacle, before it even got off the ground. In 1937, after Yasue spoke with Jewish leaders in Harbin, and convinced them that the Japanese had had a change of heart, the Far Eastern Jewish Council was established, and over the next several years many meetings were held to discuss the idea of encouraging and establishing Jewish settlements in and around Harbin.

1938 brought the Five Ministers' Conference; five of the most powerful men in Japan gathered to discuss the ideas and plans of the 'Jewish experts.' They were Prime Minister Prince Konoye (近衛 文麿), Foreign Minister Arita Hachiro (有田 八郎), Army Minister Itagaki Seishiro (板垣 征四郎), Naval Minister Yonai Mitsumasa (米内 光政), and Ikeda Shigeaki (池田 成彬), Minister of Finance, Commerce, and Industry. The ministers faced a great dilemma. On the one hand, Japan's friendship with Nazi Germany was growing stronger, and doing anything to help the Jews would endanger that relationship. On the other hand, the Jewish boycott of German goods following Kristallnacht showed the economic power and global unity of Judaism, and if Japan wished to woo the favor of the Jewish people, this was the perfect time, as many Jews were fleeing Europe and looking for somewhere to flee to. Since the Japanese Cabinet, at the time, was run by consensus, not rule of majority, this meeting became one of the longest and most complicated meetings of this cabinet. Eventually, an agreement of sorts was reached; the government would allow the fugu plan to go ahead, but they would not do anything to endanger their relationship with Germany.

The next few years were filled with reports, and meetings not only between the plotters, but also with members of the Jewish community. But the Plan never, in any official, organized way got off the ground. In 1939, the Jews of Shanghai requested that no more Jewish refugees be allowed into Shanghai, as their community's ability to support them was being stretched thin. Stephen Wise, one of the most well-known and influential members of the American Jewish community at the time expressed his strong opinion that any Jewish-Japanese cooperation would be unpatriotic, a violation of the moral embargo that the US had placed on Japan. Soviet Russia, at the same time, signed a non-aggression pact with Germany, making the transport of Jews from Europe to Japan far more difficult. The events of 1940 only solidified the impracticality of executing the Fugu Plan in any official, organized way. The USSR annexed Lithuania, further cutting off the possibilities for Jews seeking to escape Europe. The Japanese government signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, completely eliminating the possibility of any official aid for the Plan from Tokyo.

However, Sugihara Chiune, the Japanese Consul in Kovno, Lithuania, began to issue, against orders from Tokyo, transit visas to escaping Jews, allowing them to travel to Japan and stay there for a limited time, obstensibly stopping off on their way to their final destination, the Dutch colony of Curaçao, which required no entry visa. Thousands of Jews received transit visas from him, or through similar means. Some even copied, by hand, the visa that Sugihara had written. After the grueling process of requesting exit visas from the Soviet government, many Jews were allowed to cross Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, taking a boat from Vladivostok to Tsuruga, eventually being settled in Kobe, Japan.

By the summer of 1941, the Japanese government was becoming anxious about having so many Jewish refugees in such a major city, and near major military & commercial ports. It was decided that the Jews of Kobe had to be relocated to Shanghai. Only those who had lived in Kobe before the arrival of the refugees were allowed to stay. Germany had violated the Non-Agression Pact, and declared war on the USSR, making Russia and Japan enemies, and therefore putting an end to the boats from Vladvostok to Tsuruga. Several months later, just after the Attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan seized all of Shanghai; monetary aid, and in fact all communications from American Jews ceased, due to the Anglo-American Trading with the Enemy Act . Technically, the US Treasury Department would have been fairly lax regarding communications and aid sent to the Jewish refugees in Shanghai, but the American Jewish organizations insisted on stalwartly showing their patriotism, and giving no hint of treasonous activity.

In 1942, the Japanese government officially rescinded the decision of the Five Ministers' Conference, fully and officially removing their already near-nonexistent support for the near-nonexistent fugu plan. Nazi Colonel Josef Meisinger , chief of the Gestapo and nicknamed the "butcher of Warsaw," arrived in Shanghai. He convinced the local Japanese authorities to exterminate the Jewish refugees, or to put them to work in salt mines; in short, he brought Hitler and Himmler's Final Solution to Asia. Fortunately, the national government in Tokyo would not stand for this, and Meisinger's plans were reduced to simply the creation of a ghetto. Jews in Shanghai were now forced to live in certain areas, and were forbidden from leaving those areas.

Over the course of the last few years of the war, the situation got worse for the refugees before it got better; several Jewish leaders were sent to prisoners for enemy nationals, and by the end most of the Jews were starving. The ghetto was bombed just months before the end of the war, by Allied planes seeking to destroy a radio transmitter within the city, but it was eventually liberated, and Shanghai remains today one of the larger Jewish communities in East Asia.

The Fugu Plan, as envisioned by Yasue, Inuzuka, and others, failed. Those Jews that did find their way to Japan, and to Japanese-controlled China, were not brought over in especially large numbers; far fewer made the trip than had applied for visas. The Jews were not helped in any large-scale or particularly official or organized way by the national government in Tokyo. And perhaps most disappointingly for the planners, those Jews that did settle in Kobe, and then in Shanghai did next to nothing to revive or bolster the Japanese economy. These starving, filthy refugees who had come to Japan with literally nothing but the clothes on their back were not the wealthy and philanthropic American bankers and corporate leaders Yasue and Inuzuka had heard of, nor did they have the ability to elicit favor or aid for Japan from these men. Nevertheless, several thousand Jews were rescued from certain death in Nazi Europe by the policies surrounding Japan's temporary pro-Jewish attitude, and Sugihara Chiune (杉原 千畝) was bestowed the honor of "Righteous Among the Nations" by the Israeli government in 1985. In addition, the Mir Yeshiva, one of the largest centers of rabbinal study today, and the only European yeshiva to survive the Holocaust, survived as a result of these events.

References

Tokayer, Rabbi Marvin (1979). "The Fugu Plan." New York: Weatherhill, Inc.