Glance at the bestseller lists in Japan over the past decade or so, and it is hard not to conclude that the country is gripped by a powerful strain of anti-Semitism.

Books about Zionist conspiracies to take over the world, Jewish financiers sparking the Asian financial crisis, and US media in the pocket of Israel have found a large and ready audience in this island nation of 127 million, where an overwhelming majority - including some self-proclaimed academic "authorities" on the "Jewish problem" - have never met one of the country's 1,000 or so Jews. But one recent book - "Chiune" - paints a very different picture of two groups trying to help one another during one of the darkest moments of human history.

It is the moving story of Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat who risked his life to save as many as 10,000 Jews from the Holocaust.

The Jewish author, Hillel Levine, a historian and professor of religion at Boston University in Massachusetts, says his aim was to investigate the "mystery of goodness" through a biography of his Japanese hero.

But the pursuit of that lofty ideal led to a Tokyo court last month, where Mr. Levine and his Japanese publisher were sued for 10 million yen ($83,000) by Sugihara's widow, Yukiko, who claims the book defames her late husband.

As both sides in the dispute agree, the libel case - to be heard next year - is a sad development in what has otherwise been the brightest story of relations between the Japanese and the Jews.

Academics have noted the popularity of books based on "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a fabricated Jewish plot that was first translated by Japanese Army officers in the 1930s to stoke nationalism. In "Jews in the Japanese Mind," authors David Goodman and Masanori Miyazawa observe that Japanese anti-Semitism is "an eruption of the darkness in modern Japanese history.

"It is a malign version of the basic patterns of Japanese culture," they write. Even after Japan came out of its historic isolation in the 19th century, the country maintained its ambivalence to foreigners.

Today, they make up just 1 percent of its population, vulnerable to blatant discrimination such as "Japanese-only" signs at public baths, state agencies, and bars.

But the inspiring tale of Sugihara - now the subject of numerous biographies - has promised to foster a far more upbeat relationship between the two ethnic groups as well as between Japan and Israel, which has awarded Sugihara its highest honor by proclaiming him one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

Sugihara was one of the few Japanese government officials to come out of World War II with his reputation enhanced in the West, though it took several decades for his role to be acknowledged.

Now he is often referred to as "the Japanese Schindler." Like the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, he helped rescue thousands of Jews from Nazi death camps and Soviet gulags.

In 1940, while he was vice-consul at Japan's diplomatic mission in Kuanas, Lithuania, he issued life-saving transit permits allowing Jewish families fleeing from Poland to travel through Russia to Japan and then on to the US.

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