The Fugu Plan.

A Book Review.

The Fugu Plan is a book written by Rabbi Marvin Tokayer in 1979. (Paddington Press)

(The Lubavitcher Rebbe convinced Rabbi Tokayer and his then fiancée to go to serve as a rabbi in Japan.¹)

In 1968, Rabbi Tokayer moved with his family to Tokyo to become the Rabbi of the Jewish Community of Japan.

Mary Swartz was a member of the Tokyo Jewish community and a professional writer. She returned to America at the same time as Rabbi Tokayer and they collaborated on the book.

The book revolves around the stories of nine composite characters-fictionalized out of hundreds of anecdotes Rabbi Tokayer heard in his research of the time period. The dates and historical figures are accurate.

The book covers Japanese exposure to Jews via its proximity to Russia. The Fugu Plan was named after a “Japanese blowfish whose deadly poison must be removed before it can be eaten.” (52) It was Japan’s unlikely idea of treating Jews well to gain American Jewish support that they erroneously thought could affect American war aims. The Japanese feared the Jews because they believed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that the Russian soldiers in Siberia shared with them in 1919. Yet, they had benefited significantly from the war loans made to them in the Russo-Japanese War by Jacob Schiff, a German Jew who wanted to pressure the Czar, in the age of pogroms, particularly the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903, to stop mistreating the Jews under his authority.

The book goes through the story of the Japanese consul in Kovno, Lithuania in 1940- Sempo Sugihara, who issued transit visas from Japan en route to the Dutch colonial island of Curaçao in the Caribbean Sea.

(I learned about Curaçao as a tax haven in my last class in law school-summer 2002- Transnational Litigation and Dispute Resolution.)

It then follows the path of the Jews lucky enough to get passage from Vilna, Lithuania, to Moscow via train and then on the Trans Siberian Railroad to Vladivostok station and then from the harbor to the Japanese freighter to the Japanese port of Tsuruga on to Kobe, Japan, and then later, onto Shanghai.

The book is light reading and the main themes are familiar to someone familiar with the main avenues of escape from the Holocaust.

It is an in-depth look into the amazing life-saving work of Sugihara, life in Japan for the Jews, and the hardships of being in Shanghai during the war.

I read it because of my current interest in Japan, Russia, and the Jews: the Russo- Japanese War, 1904-1905, as well as the role of Russia in the Japanese surrender in WWII. A friend told me about it.

I learned a lot from this book. One important fact I did not know is that Shanghai had a ghetto.

1. Telushkin, Joseph. Rebbe: The Life and Teachings of Menachem M. Schneerson, the Most Influential Rabbi in Modern History. Harper, 2014. pages 199-201

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