My father, who was a member of the Greatest Generation, found it hard to fathom that all three of his sons would choose to drive Japanese-made cars.
Right now, in fact, my Mazda is parked in our garage, while Mary Sue’s Toyota truck is sitting in our driveway.
My parents and their peers made overwhelming sacrifices to win World War II. December 7, 1941, became a signature date for their generation-–“a day that will live in infamy,” according to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR was particularly incensed by the deceptiveness of Japan’s diplomats in Washington, right up to the hour of their nation’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
Unsurprisingly, American attitudes toward anything Japanese deteriorated radically. For many members of the Greatest Generation, it was neither simple nor easy to forgive and forget.
When people go to war, the first victim is often the humanity – even the possibility of the humanity--of one’s opponents.
That’s why it’s worth telling a story from WWII in which the hero was a Japanese diplomat.
In the summer of 1940, Chiune Sugihara was the Japanese consul in Kaunas, Lithuania. With Nazi Germans pouring in from the west, and Soviet soldiers arriving from the east, Lithuania became a No Man’s Land where tens of thousands of Polish Jews were trapped.
If they remained where they were, they would almost certainly fall victim to what would become the Holocaust.
Their only hope was immediate departure from Lithuania. But that required travel visas. And no one was willing to grant travel visas to Jewish refugees.
Sugihara, deeply touched by the pleas of desperate families, began to write visas as fast as he could. He ignored time-draining regulations. He granted precious visas even to those who had no documentation. If someone had pasted a personal photo into someone else’s passport, he granted them both a pathway to freedom, no questions asked.
Tokyo ordered him to cease and desist.
Sugihara disobeyed. During July and August that summer he worked 18-20 of every 24 hours, cranking out a month’s worth of visas every day. The Japanese government promptly removed him from his post and ordered his consulate closed.
Yet even as he journeyed to the train station on his way out of town, he kept writing visas. As the train began to roll, he passed them out the window into the surging crowd. Finally, he was reduced to hurling blank sheets of paper, stamped only with his seal and signature, onto which a visa might be hand-written.
“Please forgive me,” he shouted to those alongside the train. “I cannot write anymore. I wish you the best.”
After the war, the consul learned that his diplomatic career had been terminated because of “that incident” in Lithuania. Ultimately he was reduced to peddling light bulbs.
But today Chiune Sugihara, who died in 1986, is acknowledged as a hero in Japan. Historians estimate his courageous interventions saved at least 6,000 lives, and that 40,000 descendants of those Jewish refugees are alive today because of his audacity. He is known as Japan’s Schindler, and was granted perpetual citizenship by the nation of Israel.
“You want to know about my motivation, don’t you?” he said a few years before his death.
“It is the kind of sentiments anyone would have when he actually sees refugees face to face, begging with tears in their eyes. He just cannot help but sympathize with them. Among the refugees were the elderly and women. They were so desperate that they went so far as to kiss my shoes. Yes, I actually witnessed such scenes with my own eyes.”
Sugihara concluded: “The spirit of humanity, philanthropy … neighborly friendship … with this spirit, I ventured to do what I did … And because of this reason, I went ahead with redoubled courage.”
It was gracious of Sugihara to suggest that any of us would have responded the same way if we were in the same circumstances.
History suggests that is far from the truth.
Ancient cultures tended to divide the world into Our People and Everyone Else. And there was no inherent reason to bestow favor on outsiders.
The Greeks, who can rightfully be honored as the most civilized of societies in the Mediterranean world, identified all non-Greeks as barbarians (presumably because they stumbled in their attempts to speak Greek, sounding to Athenian ears like “alpha, beta, bar-bar-bar”).
Aristotle declared that slaves were “human tools” who didn’t rise to the level of having rights and deserving justice. Greek thinkers divided those who were free into Gold People (the elite), Silver People (the skilled and useful), and Bronze People (everybody else). Yes, those are the very metals that represent the three levels of achievement in the Olympic Games.
No one in the ancient world – not to mention myriads of world leaders in our own time – seriously imagined that people everywhere were worthy of equal honor, respect, and kindness.
No one, that is, except the authors of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures.
Women and men of every generation, every race, and every culture are equal bearers of the image of their creator (Genesis 1:26-27).
And Jesus makes it clear in Matthew 25 that whoever helps the “least of these” who are hungry, sick, in prison, or in need of a visa to escape with their lives, are actually giving such gifts to him.
Even in a world that seems calculated to break our hearts, it is still possible to discover the humanity of those around us.
And, by God’s grace and power, to respond with history-changing compassion.
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