The Fugu Plan: The Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews During World War II Review

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(More customer reviews)This interesting work sheds light on the obscure and often times hope inspiring story of the Jews who escaped from Eastern Europe and found their way to safety in Shanghai, Kobe and Harbin in Japan China and Japan. This is part history and part inspirational story, combining the stories of a large number of refugees into a number of long biographical sketches. The story is sweeping, from the ghettos of Lithuania as the storm clouds of Nazism blow across Europe, to a history of the Jews of the far east.
Probably the strongest part of the text, from a historical sense, is the history of far eastern Jewry and the Jewish settlements, however improbably, in Shanghai, China, Harbin in Manchuria and Kobe, Japan. In addition to Tientsin these were the major Jewish communities in Asia. Most of their residents were Russian Jews who had accepted Tsarist offers of freedom of religion to settle in Manchuria when the Russian owned Port Arthur, before 1905. The other communities were more diverse. As war gathered the Japanese high command and its `Jewish experts' embarked on a radical plan of settling Jews, who because of the `Protocols' were perceived as both the controllers of Communism and Capitalism, in Japanese imperial territory and thus enriching Japan through the assets and know how of the European Jews.
The story gets more complicated and has some problems in blending this with the stories of individual refugees and their reconstructed adventures and interactions. Nevertheless the story of the Japanese imperial obsession with Judaism and Japanese anti-Semitism is fascinating, as if the `Fugu plan' to resettle the Jews. There is much new material in this important text, including the Kogan papers and information about the saving of the Mir Yeshiva is fascinating. An important book to the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Seth J. Frantzman


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