Carl Yonker

Reaching the quiet mountain town of Yaotsu in central Japan is no easy journey. From Kani, the nearest city with a hotel, the route winds through smaller rural towns and rice paddies before climbing into the forested green folds of Gifu Prefecture. The air cools, the roads narrow. After a thirty-minute taxi ride, one finally arrives at a cedar building on a hill overlooking the valleys of the Hida and Kiso Rivers, home of The Chiune Sugihara Memorial Hall. The museum opened in 2000. It has served since as one of the main platforms for teaching about the Holocaust in Japan.

Sugihara (1900-1986) was the son of a provincial doctor and a mother who encouraged his education. After studying at Waseda University, he joined Japan’s Foreign Ministry and served in its imperial outposts of the 1930s, first in Japanese-occupied Harbin, Manchuria, where he mastered Russian and the ins-and-outs of diplomacy, and later in Finland, after his entry into the Soviet Union as Japan’s special envoy was denied.

In 1939, Sugihara was appointed vice-consul to Kaunas, Lithuania, a republic squeezed between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. There, in the summer of 1940, he faced the decision that would define his life.

When the Soviets occupied Lithuania and German forces advanced eastward, desperate Jewish refugees gathered outside the Japanese consulate, pleading for transit visas that might carry them through the Soviet Union and on to safety in Japan or beyond. Tokyo’s orders were unequivocal: no exceptions. But Sugihara, moved by the pleas of families, began to issue visas anyway. Day after day, he issued visas. His wife Yukiko helped him record them by hand. When he was ordered to leave the consulate in February 1941, he continued to write from his hotel, and when his train departed Kaunas for Berlin, he passed the last documents through the window to waiting hands. He issued 2,139 visas, saving an estimated 6,000 Jews in total. Their descendants number today as many as hundreds of thousands of people.

After the war, Sugihara returned to obscurity. Back in Japan in the spring of 1947, he was summoned by the Foreign Ministry and asked to resign, under the pretense of a lack of available positions in the ministry. In fact, he was summarily dismissed for insubordination; the resignation allowed the ministry to not appear to be punishing someone who had rescued Jews from certain death by providing Sugihara an option of retaining his honor despite his disobedience.

His career in shambles, Sugihara supported his family as a translator of Russian and salesman. For decades, few in Japan knew what he had done. It was the Jews who had crossed Siberia with his visas who eventually tracked him down in the 1960s and 1970s, visiting his modest home to express their gratitude.

In 1984, Yad Vashem named Sugihara as a Righteous Among the Nations, the only Japanese citizen ever to receive that title. He died two years later, still largely unknown in his own country.

In the years since, Sugihara has become Japan’s most recognized humanitarian of the Second World War, his story retold in museums, textbooks, and films. The Chiune Sugihara Memorial Hall represents the culmination of that remembrance. Inside, visitors move through exhibits chronicling Sugihara’s life: his childhood, diplomatic postings, and the famous “visas for life.” A reconstruction of Sugihara’s Kaunas office features his wooden desk, a pen poised above blank visa forms, and a single lamp casting light on the documents that changed thousands of lives. It is in this recreated office where visitors are encouraged to contemplate how they would have acted under similar circumstances: do nothing, or act with courage, even when the price is high?

The Memorial Hall’s current director, Yuko Ito, who has been in her position since April 2025, was clear in our conversation as to the answer she desires: “When we think about Sugihara, we are left with the thought of ‘we can do it, we can do it individually.’ Sugihara was a diplomat, but even if you are not, you can do something […] as human beings, as people, do something, don’t just look on.”[1]

The Memorial Hall was established through the funding of the Chiune Sugihara Memorial Fund and the Japanese government, which allocated funds to municipalities in the country to support various projects, including in Yaotsu. Operated by the town and staffed by town employees, in 2024 the museum received almost 20,000 visitors, mostly Japanese families and schoolchildren, but also some Israelis, Americans, and Europeans.[2]

The museum’s record number of visits, 52,000, was registered in 2015 following the release of the film Persona Non Grata, a Japanese-Polish biographical drama about Sugihara’s life directed by Cellin Gluck. The film’s success sparked Sugihara’s broader resurgence internationally and in Japan’s popular culture and consciousness. The film was screened widely, textbooks incorporated Sugihara’s biography into ethics education sections, and television networks aired documentaries exploring his correspondence with survivors.[3] The number of visitors then declined, averaging 31,600 annually until COVID-19 hit.[4]

Like the film, the Memorial Hall’s exhibits emphasize universal lessons of peace, courage, and humanity, often framed in the language of harmony that anchors Japan’s postwar pacifist ethos. This is both the museum’s strength and its limitation. The Holocaust becomes a lesson in global morality, a call for empathy detached from the particularities of Jewish suffering. In Yaotsu, Sugihara’s defiance is recast as an expression of Japanese virtue; a humanitarian act grounded in compassion rather than rebellion. Only passing mention is made of Japan’s alliance with Nazi Germany.

This translation has profound consequences. By centering on Sugihara, Japan positions itself within global Holocaust memory not as a bystander, let alone as an assistant to perpetrators, but as a rescuer. This distortion enables Japanese engagement with the Holocaust while sidestepping its own contribution to Nazi evils. Sugihara thus becomes a mirror through which Japan affirms its identity as a peace-loving nation and enables Japan to recast its wartime legacy and rebrand itself as a nation embodying humanitarian values.[5]

This is apparent in the trilingual displays in Japanese, English, and Hebrew introducing the Second World War in Europe and the Holocaust. Divided into two, the top half of the displays traces the fate of the Jews in Europe who did not escape and were murdered, starkly juxtaposed to the bottom half retelling the parallel story of Jews’ rescue through Sugihara.

When asked if she was concerned that visitors will only see the Holocaust through the eyes of Sugihara, Ito expressed that the museum is trying to do both: show the people who were saved and those who were not, and that there were good people who did act. She explained that “the tragedy of the Holocaust is also a universal lesson. Most people were not good. What makes Sugihara so special is that there were hundreds of diplomats from other countries who did nothing to save Jews.”[6]

A 2025 essay contest for high school students in the Gifu Prefecture who had visited the Memorial Hall asked pupils to write on the theme of “do the right thing” in the context of reflecting on Sugihara’s decision. According to Ito, essays were largely insular, focused on school life and personal life within a Japanese context, and with no broader considerations. Of the more than 200 essays submitted, not a single pupil wrote about the Holocaust, the Second World War, or making an ethical decision that helps people in desperate need.

***

The Holocaust Education Center (HEC) in Fukuyama, just north of Hiroshima, occupies a distinctive position within Japan’s commemorative topography. Established in 1995 by the Reverend Makoto Otsuka, a pastor and long-time leader within the pro-Israel Christian Beit Shalom association, the HEC was the first museum in Japan devoted solely to the Holocaust. From inception, its mandate was educational and child-centered: to render the Holocaust comprehensible to Japanese schoolchildren through small, graspable particulars rather than through abstraction and inspire them to think and act independently to create peace.[7]

The HEC’s establishment owes to Otsuka’s formative encounter in 1971 with Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, in Netanya, Israel, and to his subsequent visits to Yad Vashem. Otsuka kept in close contact with Frank, who shared his memories and presented Otsuka with various personal and family effects while encouraging him to be a person who does something to create peace.

Frank was aware of the popularity of his daughter’s diary in Japan. First translated in 1952, it became a postwar staple of moral education, generated cultural adaptations, such as in manga novels, and culturally resonated through the prism of “a kinship of victims,” through which Anne’s voice was mapped onto the nation’s engagement with the experience of nuclear devastation.[8]

Fifteen years after Otto Frank’s passing in 1980, Otsuka established the HEC and dedicated it to the memory of the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust. The museum focused on exhibitions at children’s eye level. It privileged photographs and artifacts over long texts and sought to connect Japanese children to the Holocaust mainly through the story of Anne Frank.[9]

Demand quickly exceeded the capacity of the original center, and in 2007, the HEC moved into a larger facility of roughly twenty thousand square feet on the city’s edge. New installations included a reconstructed hiding space, a model of the Amsterdam attic associated with Anne Frank, and galleries that organize the administrative machinery of genocide around ordinary objects – a suitcase, a shoe, a garment, a form – meant to index a life interrupted rather than to overwhelm the novice viewer.[10]

The design is calibrated to its audience, which is overwhelmingly scholastic. The HEC receives 7,000-8,000 visitors annually, of which 3,000 to 4,000 are Japanese schoolchildren. These numbers dropped significantly during COVID-19 and have now just returned to pre-COVID-19 levels. Other visitors are predominantly Japanese and Israeli adults, with Americans and Europeans also visiting, but in fewer numbers.[11] Perhaps if the HEC was more centrally located, more Japanese schoolchildren would visit it and its impact would be more formidable.

According to current HEC Director Akio Yoshida, high school students in Japan can graduate without knowing about the Holocaust or the Second World War beyond the most basic details, if at all, due to the structure of the curriculum and that the topic is not included on final exams.[12] As a result, most of the children who visit the museum know little to nothing about the Holocaust, or even about Sugihara, something the HEC tries to overcome by providing educators with an 18-minute video for students before they visit.[13]

As in Yaotsu, pupils are brought by teachers who have chosen to make the Holocaust part of their curriculum, either because they had previously visited the museum, because of their personal interest in the Holocaust, or because of their religious conviction.

The HEC leadership is aware of the risk of transforming the Holocaust into a generalized humanist lesson. It organizes encounters around concrete evidence and insists upon the Jewish specificity of Nazi persecution, thereby resisting the drift toward an undifferentiated pacifism.

The museum’s Christian sponsorship adds a further layer to its significance. Japan’s Jewish population is small. The HEC is thus not a communal repository but a chosen practice of remembrance by Japanese Christians in dialogue with Israeli and Jewish institutions.

This connection dates to the 1930s. Sitting in the HEC’s offices, speaking in a combination of Japanese, English and Hebrew, Rev. Otsuka related his deep love of Israel and the Jewish people owes to the inspiration of his teacher, the Rev. Takeji Otsuki, who said he had a vision from God in the 1930s in which he was commanded to pray for the establishment of the state of Israel, the peace of Jerusalem and the coming of Messiah.[14] Rev. Otsuki founded the Beit Shalom and inspired generations of Japanese Christian Zionists; Rev. Otsuka, through his life and the HEC, has dedicated himself to that same mission.[15]

***

Japan is one of several countries with designated museums or special exhibitions dedicated to the Righteous Among the Nations who saved Jews from the Nazis and their allies. In Brněnec, Czech Republic, the Museum of Survivors opened in May 2025 on the grounds of the factory where Oskar Schindler (1908-1974) employed and thereby saved an estimated 1,200 Jews.[16] For decades, the building lay abandoned, its brick walls pocked with age, its beams dark with soot.

Daniel Löw-Beer, a descendant of the factory’s prewar Jewish owners that had turned it into a profitable and important European wool factory, led the project to reclaim the site as both a memorial and a reckoning with a shattered past. Inside, glass-walled galleries open onto unrestored factory floors, the ghosts of machinery still visible beneath the new construction. The architecture itself enacts a moral dialectic – restoration and ruin held in tension.

In 1938, the factory was seized by the Nazis from the Löw-Beer family. Six years later, as the Nazi’s Eastern Front collapsed amid the advance of the Soviet Red Army, Schindler, who was born in Svitavy, a town just north of Brněnec, relocated his factory from Poland, bringing with him more than 1,000 Jews he employed. He convinced the Nazis that the labor of those Jews was critical to supporting the German war effort.[17]

Only four buildings remain on the site: the now renovated spinning mill, part of which is the museum; Schindler’s office; the barracks of the SS troops; and Schindler’s Ark, the building where the Jewish prisoners lived and worked. The museum features displays on Schindler, the Löw-Beer family, and the testimonies of survivors, as well as spaces for exhibitions, lectures, and film screenings.

Schindler’s act of rescue unfolded within an economy of theft. His decency cannot be disentangled from the profits of war, a moral entanglement and contradiction that Löw-Beer’s curatorial vision does not shy from. The museum, which currently only opens on select days, is aimed at educating secondary school children from the Czech Republic and surrounding countries, including Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, and Germany.[18]

Across the Atlantic, in Martin, Tennessee, another institution centers on the saviors of Jews. The University of Tennessee at Martin’s 2024 exhibition, Righteous Among the Nations, occupies a modest space at the university’s J. Houston Gordon Museum in the Paul Meek Library.[19] Among the 22 Righteous individuals featured in the exhibition are Sugihara and one of only five Americans to have received the honor, Roderick “Roddie” Edmonds (1919-1985) of Knoxville, Tennessee.[20]

Edmonds was a non-commissioned officer who was captured in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and sent to a German prisoner of war camp, first to Stalag IX-B at Bad Orb and then to Stalag IX-A in Ziegenhain.[21] The ranking officer in camp at Ziegenhain, Edmonds was responsible for more than 1,200 American POWs. When the camp commandant ordered Jewish soldiers to report themselves the morning after their arrival in camp in order to be separated and identified, Edmonds ordered all American soldiers to appear in formation. Enraged when he saw all the Americans without racially-based exceptions, the camp commandant demanded Edmond give up the Jewish soldiers, to which he replied, “We are all Jews here.”[22] That refusal to collaborate, spoken at gunpoint, saved roughly two hundred men.

Save for the exhibit and the efforts of Edmond’s son to preserve the memory of his father’s heroism, Edmonds’ story remains largely unknown. Recognized in 2015 by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, the US government and US Army have not recognized him, and a 2022 effort to award him a Congressional Gold Medal failed to secure enough votes, though efforts continue.[23]

If Tennessee grounds righteousness in duty, Dubai turns it into a language of intercultural encounter. In 2021, within the Crossroads of Civilizations Museum, curator and former Emirati parliamentarian Ahmad ‘Ubayd al-Mansuri inaugurated the “We Remember” Holocaust memorial exhibition, the first and thus far only permanent exhibition on the Holocaust in the Arab world.[24] The exhibition includes information on the persecution of European Jews by Nazi Germany from Kristallnacht to the implementation of the Final Solution, photos and exhibits commemorating the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust, and personal testimonies of Holocaust survivors.

Al-Mansuri believes the history of the Holocaust should be conveyed primarily through the stories of heroes who fought evil. Panels present the Mishna verse “Whoever saves one life, it is as if he has saved all mankind” and its Quranic equivalent, and digital displays narrate the rescue of European Jews by Muslims. The exhibition introduces the story of the hundreds of Jews who found refuge in Albania in 1943 and were welcomed by its majority-Muslim population. It also tells the story of individual heroes, including Muhammad Hilmi (1901-1982), an Egyptian physician who lived in Berlin and, at great personal risk, saved the life of a Jewish friend, Anna Boros, and several members of her family. Hilmi was the first Arab to be recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations.”[25]

Across the continent in Shanghai, a city once divided by foreign concessions, another museum tells a quieter story of rescue through bureaucracy. The Jewish Refugees Museum, housed in the restored Ohel Moshe Synagogue in the Hongkou District, originally opened in 2007 and reopened in 2020, chronicles the extraordinary flight of over twenty thousand Jewish refugees to Shanghai between 1938 and 1941.[26]

One small gallery is dedicated to Dr. Feng Shan Ho (1901-1997), the Chinese consul in Vienna who, defying both Nazi and Chinese directives, issued over 1,900 visas to Austrian Jews.[27] His consular seal, displayed on several passports and visas he provided, has become a modest relic of moral administration like that of Sugihara. The exhibition situates Ho within a broader narrative of humanitarianism, seeking to create “a community of a shared future for mankind.”[28] Panels describe how Shanghai, one of the few open ports in the world, became a refuge when most nations had closed their borders.

Far to the northwest, on Ķīpsala Island in Riga, Latvia, the Žanis Lipke Memorial Museum offers a different form of intimacy. Completed in 2012, the building, designed by architect Zaiga Gaile, resembles a dark, steep-roofed wooden ark, its exterior weathered. Lipke (1900-1987), a dockworker, and his wife Johanna, rescued more than fifty Jews whom they smuggled from the Riga Ghetto during the Nazi occupation by hiding them in a bunker beneath their home, providing them with food and arranging for them false documents to flee the country.[29]

The memorial’s architecture embodies concealment. Windowless, narrow passages and dim lighting reproduce the fear and claustrophobia of hiding. The engaging and passionately administrated museum pays tribute to the Lipkes’ heroism. For Latvian students, hundreds of whom visit each year and who comprise much of the audience, guides emphasize the Lipkes’ courage. They do not entirely obscure the participation of some Latvians in Nazi crimes. However, they do so through the lens of heroism and courage, telling an incomplete story.

While over 400 Latvians have been recognized for saving Jews, the majority was indifferent. Worse still, the extermination of Latvian Jews was largely done by local collaborators with exceptional ruthlessness and brutality. These were Latvians who turned on their neighbors under Nazi auspices.[30] The main museum through which Latvians learn about the Holocaust thus conveniently highlights the exception rather than counters the dark truth.

In the small Bulgarian town of Kyustendil, the Dimitar Peshev Museum stands as a testament to one man’s courage and moral conviction. Housed in the rebuilt home of Bulgaria’s former deputy speaker of parliament, the museum commemorates Peshev’s (1894-1973) pivotal role in halting the planned deportation of 48,000 Bulgarian Jews in March 1943. When he learned of the government’s intentions, Peshev mobilized parliamentary protest and enlisted the support of both the Orthodox Church and King Boris III, actions that successfully prevented the deportation of Jews within Bulgaria proper. Tragically, his intervention could not save the more than 11,000 Jews from Bulgarian-occupied Thrace and Macedonia who were sent to their deaths, a haunting reminder of the limits of individual agency under a complicity-ridden regime.[31]

Opened in 2002, visitors to the museum encounter photographs of Peshev’s petitions alongside maps of deportation routes, tracing both the geography of salvation and the pathways of loss.[32] For decades, Bulgaria emphasized the “rescue of the Bulgarian Jews” as a national virtue, often overlooking its more troubling chapters of collaboration and displacement. The Kyustendil museum confronts this selective memory, offering a nuanced narrative in which acts of conscience emerge amid complicity, and heroism is inseparable from the moral ambiguities of the time. It is both a memorial to bravery and a space for reflection on the complex interplay of courage, responsibility, and historical accountability.

Taken together, the museums and exhibitions dedicated to the Righteous Among the Nations form a global presence of moral geography. Each translates the same impulse to remember, commemorate, and advance the legacy of different heroes into a local context.

Yet the focus on the righteous in those museums and exhibitions, including, in particular, those who are singular in dealing with the Holocaust in their countries or regions, also carries risks. The Holocaust is mainly a story of human cruelty and criminality, not one of heroism and virtue. While it is important to highlight and praise the roles of the righteous individuals who risked their lives and resisted evil, it should be remembered that their stories are the exception, not the rule. The historical roots of European and German antisemitism, the cruelty and cynicism of the Nazis and their allies, the indifference to Jewish life that abounded among entire publics, the suffering of the victims, the elimination of entire communities – they should forever remain the focus of any engagement with the Holocaust.

***

Visits to Holocaust memorial museums around the world trigger historical-philosophical questions. In Japan, I could not help wondering how Germany would remember Nazism today, if in the 1930s and 1940s it was the same failed fascist, militaristic expansionist ideology, yet devoid of antisemitism and its murderous consequences.

In the heart of Tokyo, tucked behind the torii gate and shaded by gingko trees, the Yasukuni Shrine presents a scene of ritual, commemoration, and quiet that belies the intensity of the memory it holds. The venerable Shinto shrine, established in 1869 during the Meiji Restoration, is dedicated to those who died in service to the country. Some 2.5 million souls are enshrined, including over one thousand war criminals, among whom are fourteen Class-A war criminals convicted of “crimes against peace” during the military tribunals commonly known as the Tokyo Trials that followed the Second World War who were quietly added to the shrine in 1978.[33]

On the same grounds stands the Yushukan Museum, a military-history museum that traces Japan’s imperial wars from the Meiji Restoration to the end of the Second World War. Its two floors are filled with gleaming exhibits dedicated to demonstrating the sacrifices and heroism of Japan’s war dead.

The shrine and museum have become central to Japan’s contested relationship with its wartime past, offering a lens through which to view deeper questions of memory, responsibility, victimhood, and the politics of commemoration in Japan’s Second World War legacy.

Visiting the Yushukan museum, one is confronted with a narrative of war that does not begin with the rise of Japanese militarism and aggression. Rather, it informs that Japan’s modernization under Meiji, the threat of encroaching Western colonial powers, and the desire for Asian solidarity set the scene for a war of tragic necessity.

Upon entering, visitors are greeted by a Zero fighter plane, the highly maneuverable, long-range Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft that dominated the skies of the Pacific early in the war, and a Class C56 steam locomotive from the Thai-Burma Railway with a panel noting it had “been commandeered to the south for the Greater East Asian War” and “played an important role in Thailand.” The modest explanation fails to mention the tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war and Asian laborers forced by the Japanese to build the “Death Railway,” with some 100,000 dying during its construction.[34]

Inside, the museum is divided into two floors. The tour begins on the second floor, dedicated to relating Japan’s military history from the Meiji period through the Second Sino-Japanese War (referred to as the “China Incident”), before returning visitors to the first floor, dedicated to the Second World War (referred to as the Greater East Asia War). Throughout the museum, exhibits of uniforms, flags, swords, personal letters, pictures, and other effects are accompanied by displays relating the history of Japan’s military conflicts, all presented in a historical narrative of “Japan under threat,” “duty to Asia,” and “tragic national sacrifice.”

A display addressing America’s entry into the Second World War suggests that the Roosevelt administration took a confrontational approach to Japan, abrogated the US-Japan Trade and Navigation Treaty, and imposed an oil embargo (Japan was overly dependent on American oil imports at the time). That, according to the display, triggered the war. It further argues that diplomatic negotiations in 1941 failed because of the harsh terms demanded by the United States. Not seeing any room for compromise, Japan concluded that war was inevitable and ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

The Yushukan Museum embodies one of three broad narratives that shape Japan’s historical memory of the Second World War: revisionism. The revisionist narrative, which has gained traction in the country since the 1980s in nationalist and conservative circles, promotes a reinterpretation of Japan’s wartime past, depicting Japan as an Asian liberator that fought the American aggressor and resisted Western colonialism. It highlights narratives of self-sacrifice and self-defense while downplaying or omitting Japanese imperialism, colonial exploitation, and the atrocities and war crimes it committed in East Asia.[35]

Thus, the museum speaks of the “China Incident” and not the “Rape of Nanjing” in which the Imperial Japanese Army massacred over 200,000 Chinese civilians, non-combatants, and prisoners of war. Any mention is omitted of atrocities committed by Japan during the Second World War, such as sexual slavery (so-called “comfort women”) and the human experimentation that was part of the development of chemical and biological weapons by Unit 731 in the puppet state of Manchukuo on mainland China.

The revisionist narrative intersects and conflicts with the two other predominant Japanese narratives around memory of the war: victimhood and pacifism. These narratives are embodied at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Hiroshima Peace Museum.

The skeletal Atomic Bomb Dome (Genbaku Dōmu) stands at the Peace Memorial Park along the Motoyasu River. It is a ruin of August 6, 1945, when an American B-29 bomber dropped the atomic bomb “Little Boy” at 8:15 am, destroying the city and killing an estimated 140,000 people. The Peace Museum features testimonies and is filled with thousands of artifacts from the survivors and the destruction. It conveys the horror of nuclear war in immediate, visceral form.

Hiroshima’s memory is one of civilian suffering, nuclear devastation, and pacifist hope. The story told is about a nuclear bomb that indiscriminately killed and wounded tens of thousands of people. It is about horror and inhumanity that must be related so that there are “no more Hiroshimas.”

The memory that Hiroshima projects is one of victimhood and pacifism rather than reckoning with the Japanese responsibility for the start of the war that led to the bombing.⁷ Hiroshima is taught primarily as a symbol of suffering inflicted onJapan, not of Japan’s role in waging the war that preceded the bombing.

The inscription on the cenotaph in the Peace Memorial Park reads “Let all the souls here rest in peace … for we shall not repeat the evil.” Broadly interpreted, it is a pacifist call for all humanity against war; narrowly interpreted, a pacifist call against the use of nuclear weapons. Such lessons are admirable, but the narrative of the memorial omits the agency and culpability of Japan in the war and events that led up to that fateful, destructive moment.

The narratives of victimhood and pacifism dominate Japanese historical memory, extending beyond the tragedies of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cast Japan as the victim of fire-bombings, intense conventional bombings, invasion, and defeat. Suffering is acknowledged, but agency and responsibility are not.

The pacifist narrative emerged strongly in the immediate postwar era. Japan’s 1947 Constitution renounced war, and the new identity of a “peace nation” (shugoku) took hold. The Hiroshima Peace Museum and Peace Memorial Park undergird this narrative, making war something to reject and militarism something to repent. Yet, together with the narrative of victimhood, the narrative of pacifism frames Japan only as a victim, not an aggressor. It is selective: it remembers Japanese suffering more readily than Japanese violence.

The three narratives do not align neatly. They often conflict. The victimhood narrative wants Japan to be seen as innocent and wronged; the pacifist narrative seeks a break with militarism; the revisionist narrative seeks dignity without apology. 

The question emerges: how should Japan remember the war in the Pacific, and how should memorials function? It is linked, more broadly, to the question of how Japan should remember the war in Europe and the Holocaust, or should it at all?

The controversies surrounding the Yasukuni Shrine reveal the difficulties Japan faces in reconciling its national pride with its wartime guilt. In Germany, the Holocaust serves as an organizing principle for remembrance. It anchors the nation’s moral reckoning with its Nazi past. Japan does not have a similar anchor. Even the Nanjing Massacre and the sexual enslavement of “comfort women” remain contested in public discourse.[36] This divergence has led historian Ian Buruma to suggest that Germany’s memory culture is structured around guilt, while Japan’s is structured around loss.[37] The contrast is striking. In the Japanese narrative, war is a tragedy rather than a crime.

If one removes the Holocaust from the equation, can Japan’s war be equated in moral terms with Germany’s? Were the Japanese as “evil” as the Germans in the Second World War – or perhaps as culpable as Germany in the First?

The questions, uncomfortable as they may be, expose the moral hierarchy that structures the memory of the twentieth century. The answer must be careful and considered. Nazi Germany and Japan were very different in kind, though similar in dimensions of violence, ideology, and empire. The challenge is not moral ranking but moral recognition.

The Holocaust, which industrialized the mass murder of six million Jews, established an absolute moral benchmark; any nation that did not partake in the extermination of Jews appears, by contrast, less malevolent. Yet this comparative logic risks obscuring Japan’s own record of atrocity during the Second World War: The massacre of civilians in China, biological and chemical warfare, and human experimentation by Unit 731, the starvation and torture of prisoners of war, and the systemic enslavement of women across Asia.[38] These acts did not seek the total extermination of a specific people, but they did embody a racial ideology that positioned Japan as the superior power in Asia, a parallel, if not an equivalent, to the racial hierarchies that underpinned Nazi thought.

***

When reporters asked President Franklin D. Roosevelt from where bombers had taken off for the April 12, 1942, Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, named after Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, he quipped, “Shangri-La,” invoking the mythical Himalayan paradise from James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933).  Two years later, the joke became literal: Doolittle’s wife Josephine christened a carrier in honor of the imaginary airfield.

On September 16, 1945, following the Japanese surrender, the USS Shangri-La CV-38 entered Tokyo Bay, anchoring off Yokohama just south of Tokyo. Its operational history was brief yet important. It joined the Pacific Fleet in April 1945 after traversing the Panama Canal, completing further training at Pearl Harbor, and launching strikes against Okinawa and then on Honshu and Hokkaido during the war’s final months. By late summer, the ship was part of Task Force 38 that raided Tokyo’s outskirts as Japan teetered on collapse in July 1945.

One of the sailors on board, commissioned on September 15, 1944, was a twenty-year-old farm boy from Marion, Nebraska, who turned Navy Fireman. His name was Edward Yonker. He was my grandfather.

Grandpa Ed never liked to talk much, not even about his days of heroism. When he did, he tended to discuss facts, not emotions. I do not remember much of what he told me about the war. I do remember his story of how he had to get his mother’s permission to enlist because two of his brothers were already in combat.

As I traveled across Japan, learning about local perspectives of the Second World War and the Holocaust, I realized for the first time what an immense debt of gratitude my generation owes to that of my grandfather. I understood for the first time the meaning of the cliché that freedom must never be taken for granted and that some things are worth fighting for, whatever the price. And I felt, as I haven’t felt for a long time, how much I miss my grandfather.

I dedicate this study in loving memory to Edward Yonker.

Policy Proposals

  1. Educators, for the sake of history and justice – stay focused. Commendable as they are, museums and exhibitions dedicated to the Righteous Among the Nations, or paying equal attention to evildoers and rescuers, risk distorting both the study of the Holocaust as a historical event and the discussion about its moral lessons. Schools and other institutions that attend those museums are advised to do so only after their pupils have gained thorough and unsparing knowledge about the roots of modern antisemitism, the rise of Nazism as an ideology and practice, and how the murder of six million Jews was enabled and facilitated.
  2. Emphasize the exceptionality. Museums, exhibits, and educational material on Righteous Among the Nations worldwide should emphasize and make clear the exceptionality of the individuals represented, stressing that when Jews and other minorities were sent to their deaths, most people did not act and stood by, while others actively participated in the murder.
  3. Let Israelis Know. As a form of Hakarat Hatov and as a lesson in courage and the importance of the universal values of human rights and dignity, Israeli schoolchildren should be required to learn about and engage with the story of one Righteous Among the Nations every year.
  • Dr. Carl Yonker, Project Manager and Senior Researcher at the Center

[1] Interview by the author, September 23, 2025.

[2] Interview by the author, September 23, 2025.

[3] Interview by the author, September 23, 2025.

[4] Interview by the author, September 23, 2025.

[5] See Rotem Kowner, “A Holocaust Paragon of Virtue’s Rise to Fame: The Transnational Commemoration of the Japanese Diplomat Sugihara Chiune and Its Divergent National Motives,” The American Historical Review 128, no. 1 (March 2023), pp. 31-32, 51-56.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Interview by the author, September 18, 2025.

[8] Ibid., and Cnaan Liphshiz, “Behind Japanese Fascination with Anne Frank, A ‘Kinship of Victims,’” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, January 21, 2014, https://www.jta.org/2014/01/21/global/behind-japanese-fascination-with-anne-frank-a-kinship-of-victims.

[9] Interview by the author with Akio Yoshida, September 18, 2025.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] The Associated Press, “Museum Opens in Czech Republic at Site Where Oskar Schindler Saved 1,200 Jews,” NPR, May 12, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/05/12/g-s1-66131/holocaust-survivors-museum-czech-republic-oskar-schindler.

[17] Ibid., and Eli Wizevich,  “The Czech Factory Where Oskar Schindler Saved 1,200 Jews Is Now a Museum in Their Honor,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 14, 2025, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-czech-factory-where-oskar-schindler-saved-1200-jews-is-now-a-museum-in-their-honor-180986622/.

[18] Arks Foundation, “Saving Schindler’s Ark,” arksfoundation.net, nd, https://arksfoundation.net/.

[19] “‘Righteous Among the Nations’ Exhibition Opens on Campus,” UT-Martin, February 15, 2024, https://news.utm.edu/2024/02/15/righteous-among-the-nations-exhibit-opens-on-campus/.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Richard Hurowitz, “The Story of an Unjustly Overlooked American World War II Hero,” Time, August 19, 2023, https://time.com/6306430/roddie-edmonds-american-world-war-ii/.

[22] Ibid. and “About,” roddieedmonds.com, nd, https://www.roddieedmonds.com/about.

[23] Hurowitz, “The Story of an Unjustly Overlooked American World War II Hero.”

[24] Uriya Shavit and Ofir Winter, “The Muslim World: Holocaust Memorial Museums in Indonesia, Dubai and Albania,” For A Righteous Cause 2025, Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, January 2025, pp. 17-19, https://cst.tau.ac.il/publications/for-a-righteous-cause-2025/; Uriya Shavit, “Notes From the Emirates,” Perspectives 23, Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry,  April 2023, https://cst.tau.ac.il/perspectives/notes-from-the-emirates/; Ofir Winter, “Discovering the Past, Building a Future,” For A Righteous Cause 2022, Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, January 2022, pp. 5-7, https://cst.tau.ac.il/for-a-righteous-cause/.

[25] Shavit and Winter, “The Muslim World,” p. 18.

[26] Yang Jian, “Jewish Refugees Museum Opens New Chapter of History,” City News Service, December 14, 2020, https://www.citynewsservice.cn/articles/shanghaidaily/news/jewish-refugees-museum-opens-new-chapter-of-history-yn6vlbdk.

[27] Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, “Permanent Exhibition: Fleeing to Shanghai – Dr. Feng Shan Ho,” shkjrm.com, nd, https://www.shhkjrm.com/en/Exhibitions/Permanent_Exhibition.htm.

[28] Jian, “Jewish Refugees Museum.”

[29] David Silberman, Lipke’s List: The story of Žanis Lipke and the Jews He Saved (Riga: Janis Lipke Memorial, 2020), pp. 19-38.

[30] Carl Yonker, “Past Present,” Perspectives no. 25, Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, August 2023, https://cst.tau.ac.il/perspectives/past-present/.

[31] “Dimitar Peshev – The Story,” peshev.org, nd, https://www.peshev.org/story.htm, and “Dimitar Peshev (Bulgaria),” Yad Vashem, nd, https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/stories/peshev.html.

[32] “Dimitar Peshev House-Museum, Kyustendil,” nf-21.com, nd, https://nf-21.com/DC/en/material-assets/kyustendil/kyustendil-municipality/379-house-museum-dimitar-peshev-kyustendil.

[33] “Hirohito Quit Yasukuni Shrine Visits Over Concerns about War Criminals,” The New York Times, April 26, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/world/asia/26iht-japan.1.5447598.html; David Kenley, “History and Memory: The Role of War Memorial Museums in China and Japan,” History, Literature, and the Construction of “Memory” in Asia 14, no. 1 (Spring 2009), p. 10; and Higurashi Yoshinobu, “Yasukuni and the Enshrinement of War Criminals,” nippon.com, November 25, 2013, https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a02404/.

[34] John Breen, “Yasukuni Shrine: Ritual and Memory,” The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus 3, no. 6 (2005), p. 3.

[35] Kenley, “History and Memory,” p. 5; and Akiko Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015), pp. 11, 164-166.

[36] John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), pp. 47-49.

[37] See: Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2015).

[38] See, for example, Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 45-66, 92-99, 135-156.