A Righteous Man in Japan

In the early 1940s, in the middle of World War II, a young Jewish student was arrested for wearing tefillin, phylacteries traditionally placed on the arm and head during prayer, on the rooftop of a store. This was somewhat of a surprise, for he was neither in Berlin nor Warsaw, but rather Kobe, Japan. Thousands of European Jews had obtained visas through the heroic kindness of Chiune Sugihara, vice-consul for the Japanese Empire in Kaunas, Lithuania, who risked his life to provide safe passage out of the reach of the Nazis and into Japanese territory. Included among these survivors were many students and teachers of the renowned Mirrer Yeshiva.

The student had been apprehended because a nervous elevator operator mistakenly believed him to be a spy. The local thought the tefillin strap was an antenna and the box was a transmitter.

Thankfully, Setsuzō Kotsuji arrived at the scene. He immediately went to the police station and explained that the Jewish youth had been praying. The student was promptly set free.

This act of kindness was just one of countless life-changing moments orchestrated by the Shinto-trained Christian-Japanese scholar and recounted in the breathtakingly powerful Kotsuji's Gift: The Daring Rescue of Japan's Jewish Refugees by Jundai Yamada.

The book is actually two works in one: The first half is Kotsuji’s own memoir, originally published decades ago. The second half, by Yamada, provides further commentary and context.

Yamada, a major Japanese actor who has also starred in Hollywood productions (including the HBO Max series Tokyo Vice) learned of the largely unknown hero’s story and committed to publishing and popularizing it in his native country, and now for English-language audiences.

As the volume details, before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the country had served as a temporary haven. Kotsuji arranged for thousands of visa extensions, travel arrangements, even Torah learning opportunities for Jewish refugees. He himself had studied Hebrew in an American university after coming across a Hebrew Bible, translated in Japanese. He could speak the language fairly fluently. When the imperial army conquered Manchuria in 1932, Kotsuji interacted with the local Jewish community in Harbin, and Emperor Hirohito invited him to serve as his Jewish Affairs adviser. In 1937, Kotsuji published a book in Japanese on Hebrew language and grammar, and as global anti-Semitism grew, he toured his home country lecturing against Nazi-inspired anti-Jewish propaganda. He then published The True Character of the Jewish Nation to counter German Jew-hatred. He was tortured and almost assassinated for his troubles.

But his experiences stirred something within his soul. Around a decade and a half after the war, at age 60, Kotsuji flew to Israel and converted to Judaism. To afford the plane ticket, he mortgaged his house. "Life is short," he recounts his wife saying. "When you want something, you should have it, regardless of the criticism of friends." Kotsuji recalled:

I did not know what would happen later. I did not calculate like an accountant, but I placed my faith in God and went ahead with my plans. Without my wife’s encouragement, perhaps I would not have done it. If she had opposed me, I would have been troubled in my heart; but she knew that conversion was my destiny, and she was my support. Thus, on August 8, 1959, without telling anyone but my family, I went out to Haneda Airport in Tokyo and boarded a plane for Israel. I felt, suddenly, as the plane flew down the runway, that I had embarked upon a brand new life.

He was circumcised at the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. Japan’s first convert to the biblical faith took on the name Abraham, history’s first Jew. Not long after leaving the hospital, Kotsuji reunited with the Mirrer Yeshiva students whose lives he had saved 20 years earlier.

Yamada sets the scene:

During the war, most of the yeshivas in Europe were destroyed by the Nazis, but the Mirrer was the one school whose students and faculty were able to escape from Poland to Japan. Kotsuji enabled them to continue their studies in Kobe and arranged for their passage to Shanghai. Those students were now successful members of society and standing before him on this day. Kotsuji looked at each of their faces and spoke to them.

"Everyone, I feel deep emotions as I stand here on this sacred ground. It brings back the memory of when the yeshiva came to Kobe and the many times I went to Kobe. I kept praying that somehow everyone would be saved. Since then, we have had a very deep bond. All that time I had been yearning to come to this place. This is holy ground. And now with the help of friends, I have been able to journey to Jerusalem, and also make my long-desired conversion a reality. Now I am a Jew. My fate is your fate. Your lives are my life."

The applause for Kotsuji’s speech seemed unending.

Kotsuji had long had a habit of quoting Scripture, even prior to his entering the People of Israel. His audience in that moment no doubt understood the last line of his speech—it was a paraphrase of the biblical heroine Ruth’s own words of loyalty to her mother-in-law Naomi, "For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God."

In a point made simply but profoundly, Yamada notes that visitors to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum won’t find Kotsuji listed among the "Righteous Among the Nations," its recognition of non-Jews who saved Jews during the war. That’s because, of course, Kotsuji lived out his days as a Jew.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, whose maternal grandparents, Rabbi Shmuel Dovid and Nachama Warshavchik, were among those given life-saving help by Kotsuji, notes in the book’s moving foreword that Yamada’s reflections "were written before October 7, 2023, and they resonate even more at this moment. The past many months have been difficult ones for the Jewish people, but the courage and the resilience reflected in Israel and the Jewish world have made manifest what even the enemies of the Jews have noted about us: that we love life, that we well understand its fragility, and that we therefore place gratitude at the heart of Jewish existence. That Kotsuji himself would devote his life to Judaism and the Jewish people, and help protect so many, is thus a great source of gratitude, one of the remarkable ways in which Providence has revealed itself in Jewish history. That Jundai Yamada would be so moved by this story that he would travel the world to research it and work to tell it to his countrymen is a miracle all its own."

Kotsuji's Gift: The Daring Rescue of Japan's Jewish Refugees
by Jundai Yamada
Maggid, 380 pp., $29.95

Stuart Halpern, senior adviser to the provost and deputy director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University, is the author, with Wilfred M. McClay, of Jewish Roots of American Liberty: The Impact of Hebraic Ideas on the American Story (Encounter).

The post A Righteous Man in Japan appeared first on .