Japan's WWII 'Schindler' leaves a controversial legacy

Although his deeds were largely unrecognized in his own country when he died in 1986, Sugihara's story has recently become well known largely through the reminiscences of his wife, Yukiko, who has described how she and her husband fought against their own Foreign Ministry to help those in need.

During a frantic 29-day period, she says the two of them hand-wrote 2,139 of the "visas for life" at no charge. According to some of those they helped, the couple continued writing visas and throwing them from their train even as they were evacuating the city before a Soviet offensive. "They were human beings and they needed help," Sugihara said afterward.

His initiative helped to save about 10,000 people, but when Sugihara, a Christian, finally returned to Tokyo in 1947, his resignation was demanded.

"They told him to quit and they cut his pension," said Yukiko Sugihara, who blames Japan's foreign office for her husband's death in 1986. "In my view, they killed him, because from then on he was forced to work himself to death trying to make a living."

Mr. Levine, however, paints a more complex picture in his book, which received positive reviews in 1996 when was it first published in the US, under the title "In Search of Sugihara."

The scholar says that - far from being a heroic individual who put his conscience before his country - the diplomat was a spy who issued the visas on government orders to curry favor with the powerful Jewish community in the US when many in Japan were still trying to avoid war.

Levine's book also questions Sugihara's squeaky-clean image with anecdotes about him visiting a "soapland" brothel and using his impressive alcohol tolerance to win over Russian commissars.

Perhaps most shocking to the Sugihara family, the author also uncovered a Russian woman who married and divorced the diplomat in his youth - a subject Yukiko either knew nothing about or chose not to mention.

"My mother became ill after reading this book," said Michi Sugihara, the daughter of Chiune and Yukiko. "It is full of mistakes and exaggerations, distorts the image of my father, and damages our family's reputation."

The Sugihara family say the style of writing creates an impression of Chiune as a larger-than-life, almost American figure, rather than the low-key Japanese man they claim he was.

They also say Levine never interviewed Yukiko Sugihara, as he claims in his book, and that Chiune's first wife, Klaudia, was already dead when the author said he had talked to her in an Australian nursing home.

Levine says the lawsuit, which comes four years after the Japanese translation of his book was published, may be motivated by a desire to discredit him because of the film rights.

"The charges against me are absurd and frivolous," says Levine. "In the United States, this would be laughed out of court. My intention as a scholar is to tell the truth about Sugihara, to put him in the class of Gandhi and other great heroes. Whoever made the accusations is not a historian and probably cannot understand English."

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