Customer Reviews

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

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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

The book; The Fugu Plan is almost four books in one. It reveals the plan by members of the Japanese government to settle European Jews in the occupied northern Chinese province of Manchuria that had been conquered by Japan prior to the beginning of WWII. Why the plan never came to fruition is a combination of naivete on the part of the Japanese and intransigence on the part of an American Jewish leader.

Also detailed are the actions of the Japanese counsel in Kovno, Lithuania who saved 6,000 Jews from the Nazis. The majority of the book describes the experiences of the Polish Jewish refugees who made it to Japan with their illegitimate transit visas. Life in Kobe, Japan and occupied Shanghai is described through the stories of several refugees. It is here that I find one of the two faults in the book. The authors chose to make the refuges composite images so that the reader is unsure if events portrayed really happened. I do not know whether this departure from standard narrative history writing was done to make the story line flow better or to protect the identities of several refugees whose behavior was less than exemplary.

My biggest complaint is the lack of sourcing. Although much of the details of the refugees lives were obtained from interviews conducted by the first author, no historian of the period can use this book to further their research.

In summary the Fugu Plan is a compelling, but undocumented read, that leaves the reader wondering if all of it is true.

The book was great! It explained a very complicated idea/ time in history clearly and the details were selected to help the reader understand. The book was both informative and interesting.

I usually look for books which delves into details about a subject familiar to me. This book covers an area of history that was a complete blank to me - the Japanese connection to the Holocaust. Germany's Asian friend in the then Axis of Evil was the only nation who had a plan to stop the extermination of the Jews. The plan was to save at least one million, but they ended up protecting only tens of thousands. Still a better track record than the US.

Schindler got a major motion picture out of his story, this tale remains next to unknown - lets change that.

As for the book: Rabbi Tokayer writes as he speaks: very well. I might have to buy a second copy since mine always seems be lent out.

A rich history of a seldom-studied event, it's an engaging chronology of self-serving saviors, righteousness, evil, and the struggle to survive in a time of unimaginable peril.

This amazing story about Japanese benevolence towards Jewish refugees during World War II puts to shame the allies, who consistently refused desperate requests of these wretched souls for a place of refuge from the Nazis. And even more ironic is that Nazi Germany's Asian ally, Japan, opened her gates of benevolence! The final ugly twist to this saga is that Japan, of all the participants in World War II, was singled out for nuclear holocaust by the Americans and British! One can only wonder and groan at the savage irony that the nation to went out of its way to proffer kindness to Jews received the "gift" of the atomic bomb, created largely by American Jewish nuclear scientists. One can only shake one's head and wonder and lift one's eyes to Heaven and weep...