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Despite their number in East Asia never exceeding 36,000 (currently around 10,000), Jews there are the subject of both distinctly strong positive and negative views. The presence of these attitudes is astounding not only because most of those who hold them have never come across a Jew, but also because the region misses most of the 'classical' motives for either philosemitism or antisemitism. An analysis of contemporary attitudes towards Jews in China, Japan and South Korea, including reactions to the still ongoing Israel–Hamas war, reveals that the distinctions between antisemitism and philosemitism are more blurred and nuanced than is often acknowledged. In East Asia, these two attitudes tend to reflect similar functions, and people often express both views without being aware of their historical and religious context elsewhere. Accordingly, this study by Kowner, Ainslie and Podoler calls for a reassessment of antisemitism beyond the Christian and Islamic spheres, to address this new and changing world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the summer of 1940, Sugihara Chiune (1900–1986), the Japanese consul in Lithuania, issued transit visas to several thousand Polish-citizen refugees, mostly Jews. His willingness to do so was instrumental in their departure overseas shortly after the country was taken over by Soviet forces. Almost a year later, as Operation Barbarossa unfolded, the Jewish community in Lithuania, along with the remaining refugees, was brutally annihilated. Decades later, the Israeli state memorial Yad Vashem conferred the title of Righteous Among the Nations on Sugihara, thereby initiating his commemoration as a Holocaust rescuer. Today, Sugihara has become a national hero in Japan and is considered a paragon of virtue in a number of other countries too. This article examines the way Sugihara was transformed from a completely unknown figure into a world-famous symbol of Holocaust-era heroism. It focuses on the transnational mechanisms that facilitated this transformation as well as on the divergent but often also complementary motives in three of the countries most involved in the commemoration: Japan, Israel, and Lithuania. By so doing, this article seeks to uncover the theoretical underpinning of heroism and its memory and the way they are manipulated across cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exodus of Jewish refugees from Lithuania to East Asia in late 1940 has become one of the most remarkable stories of rescue during the Holocaust. The largest group among these refugees was the Mir Yeshiva—one of Europe's most notable Jewish educational institutions at the time, and the only Lithuanian yeshiva to survive the war in its entirety. Recent studies of this story have emphasized the role of the rescuers—particularly the Japanese vice consul Sugihara Chiune, who issued visas to the Jews—while neglecting the perspectives of the rescued. Nevertheless, the Mir Yeshiva has produced numerous accounts of its wartime ordeal over the past seventy years. Overlooked for the most part by the historiography of this period, the Mir testimonies and writings shed new light on the experiences of the Jewish refugees in Lithuania (1939–1940) and East Asia (1941–1945). Considering these accounts within their broader historical and international context, this article highlights their contribution to our understanding of this episode and Japanese wartime attitudes toward Jewish refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]