Sugihara Chiune: The Duty and Humanity of an Intelligence Officer

Sugihara Chiune was a diplomat who saved more than several thousand lives from the Nazis and U.S.S.R. during the second World War by issuing them with Japanese transit visas. Why was he able to continue handing out these “visas for life”? The man behind these actions was in fact an intelligence professional of rare caliber who, aware of the crisis confronting his nation early on, maintained a precarious balancing act as he traveled around war-torn Europe closely analyzing the global situation. The author, who has spent more than thirty years studying Sugihara, describes here for the first time the real person behind the diplomat and the truth behind the miraculous issue of those visas, based on his close study of documents in the voluminous archive of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and of other historical sources. This nonfiction work is the tour de force of the Foreign Ministry’s preeminent “treasure hunter.”