During the Second World War, Sugihara helped thousands of Jews flee Europe by issuing transit visas to them so that they could travel through Japanese territory, risking his career and the lives of his family.

At that time, he entered Yuai Gakusha, the Christian fraternity that had been founded by Baptist pastor Harry Baxter Benninghoff, to improve his English.

From 1920 to 1922, Sugihara served in the Imperial Japanese Army as a second lieutenant with the 79th Infantry Regiment, stationed in Korea, then part of the Empire of Japan.

[7] During his time in Harbin, Sugihara married Klaudia Semionovna Apollonova and converted to Christianity (Russian Orthodox Church),[8] using the baptismal name Sergei Pavlovich.

[2] In 1934, Sugihara quit his post as Deputy Foreign Minister in Manchukuo in protest over Japanese mistreatment of the local Chinese.

[11][12] Chiune Sugihara also served in the Information Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and as a translator for the Japanese delegation in Helsinki, Finland.

[17] As the Soviet Union occupied sovereign Lithuania in 1940, many Polish and Lithuanian Jews fearing persecution tried to acquire exit visas.

instead still wished to emigrate—principally rabbis, yeshiva students, members of the intellectual classes and leaders of various Jewish communal and labor organizations.

[citation needed] In July 1940, Jewish refugees from Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and other countries began arriving in Japan at Tsuruga, Shimonoseki and Kobe.

[27] The Siberian railway had been closed and no evidence supporting this figure is found in JDC annual reports or MOFA documents.

[1] Being aware that applicants were in danger if they stayed behind, Sugihara decided to ignore his orders and, from 18 July to 28 August 1940, issued ten-day visas to Jews for transit through Japan.

He spoke to Soviet officials who agreed to let the Jews travel through the country via the Trans-Siberian Railway at five times the standard ticket price.

His son Hiroki noted, "my father continued to pen visas even at the railway station, throwing the last stamped passports out of the window of our train".

[33] In final desperation, blank sheets of paper with only the consulate seal and his signature (that could be later written over into a visa) were hurriedly prepared and flung out from the train.

According to the refugee name list surveyed by Fukui Prefecture,[41] of the 306 persons who landed at Tsuruga Port in October 1940, there were 203 Poles.

[42] The documents of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum[43] and "Refugee and Survivor" do not mention the number of people saved by a "Sugihara visa".

According to Emigration Table by Jewcom, the number of Polish refugees leaving Japan for various destinations was Shanghai 860, US 532, Canada 186, Palestine 186, Australia 81, South Africa 59, and others 207, in total 2,111.

The total number of Jews saved by Sugihara is in dispute, with estimates around 6,000; family visas—which allowed several people to travel on one visa—were also issued, which would account for the much higher figure.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has estimated that Chiune Sugihara issued transit visas for about 6,000 Jews and that around 40,000 descendants of the Jewish refugees are alive today because of his actions.

[46] Some Jews who received Sugihara's visas did not leave Lithuania in time, were captured by the Germans after Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, and perished in the Holocaust.

The remaining number of Sugihara survivors stayed in Japan until they were deported to Japanese-held Shanghai, where there was already a large Jewish community that had existed as early as the mid-1930s.

A group of thirty people, all possessing a visa of "Jakub Goldberg", were shuttled back and forth on the open sea for several weeks before finally being allowed to pass through Tsuruga.

Sugihara was reassigned to Königsberg, East Prussia[46][page needed] before serving as a Consul General in Prague, in the German-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, from March 1941 to late 1942 and in the legation in Bucharest, Romania from 1942 to 1944.

Utilizing his command of the Russian language, Sugihara went on to work and live a low-key existence in the Soviet Union for sixteen years, while his family stayed in Japan.

In 1968, Yehoshua Nishri, an economic attaché to the Israeli Embassy in Tokyo and one of the Sugihara beneficiaries, finally located and contacted him.

Only when a large Jewish delegation from around the world, including the Israeli ambassador to Japan, attended his funeral, did his neighbours find out what he had done.

[54] His death spotlighted his humanitarian acts during World War II and created the opportunity to revise his reputation as a diplomat in his own country.

[60][61] When Sugihara's widow Yukiko travelled to Jerusalem in 1998, she was met by tearful survivors who showed her the yellowing visas that her husband had signed.

The Lithuanian government declared 2020 "The Year of Chiune Sugihara", promising to erect a monument to him and issue postage stamps in his honor.

[68] Since October 2021, there is a Chiune Sugihara Square in Jerusalem as well as a Garden named for him in the Kiryat Hayovel neighborhood of the city.