History and its telling often turn on big events like wars and revolution. But sometimes it comes down to something much smaller, behind the scenes. A single conversation or even a chance meeting can launch one alternate universe instead of another. That’s the sliding doors story of Japan’s bizarre Fugu Plan to resettle Jewish refugees during World War 2. This little-known saga might have been lost in time if not for a man named Marvin Tokayer and and a chance bookshop discovery.
It all begins not in wartime Japan or Nazi Germany, but in New York City in the late 1960s, when like many other Jewish couples, Tokayer, a young rabbi, along with his fiancée, mailed a wedding invitation to the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
Perhaps Tokayer expected a blessing or a letter in return. Instead, he received an invitation of his own. The Rebbe wanted to meet with him. During that encounter, the Rebbe asked about a project Tokayer had recently undertaken when he helped uncover a forgotten Jewish cemetery in Nagasaki – one of the cities, in addition to Kobe, that housed Jewish life in Japan since the land opened to trade in the 1860s.
The Rebbe listened to Tokayer and then he posed a question. Why devote so much attention to the dead when there were living Jews in Japan who needed a rabbi among them? The question caught Tokayer off guard. Move to Japan? That wasn’t the plan.
The Rebbe disagreed. The Jewish community in Japan required leadership, he insisted. Small communities were important. They mattered. No community should be abandoned. And so, the Rebbe challenged him: Go.
Peer through one door into a universe where the rabbi smiles politely at the Rebbe and simply says “No, thank you.”
Peer through a different door where the rabbi is struck by what the Rebbe says and is even inspired to pack up and board a plane to far-off Tokyo.
That is the door he actually stepped through, eventually, and that is the universe that unfolded.
In 1968, Marvin Tokayer moved with his family to Tokyo to serve as Rabbi of the Jewish community. He was one of the few rabbis then working with communities in the Far East. And he served in much the way the Rebbe had advised, not limiting himself to the synagogue but going out into the community, trying to build a school, teaching and learning Torah.
At that point in time, the region was thiving economically. The Jewish community itself was made up primarily of people who had been refugees in Shanghai and Japan, and later flocked to Tokyo, after the war. Tokayer was fascinated by their stories. The longer he lived there, the more curious he became about the question of how Jews fared in East Asia during the Holocaust period.
Some of the stories were more well known. But his questioning also led him down a rabbit hole of other stories that few Western historians had explored, all catapulted by a mysterious find in a secondhand bookshop – bound papers mentioning something called “The Fugu Plan” – but more on that in a bit.
The Jewish community of Kobe had long been welcoming and organized, so as the Holocaust began to unfold in Europe, it was able to comfortably absorb thousands of Jewish refugees.
During the 1930s, while Nazi Germany was intensifying its persecution of Jews, some Japanese officials were even discussing how Jewish refugees might help strengthen the Japanese Empire. Their idea centered on settling Jewish refugees in Japanese-controlled territories, particularly Manchukuo in northeastern China. The officials behind the plan believed Jewish leaders and settlers could contribute investment, expertise, and economic development.
Their reasoning for this was deeply flawed in some respects. Many had absorbed exaggerated myths about Jewish wealth and influence circulating internationally at the time, especially from the notorious booklet of antisemitic fiction masquerading as fact, The Jewish Peril: Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
But within the swirl of the zeitgeist and misunderstandings, the Japanese somehow arrived at a startling conclusion: Instead of excluding Jews, they wanted to attract them. This proposal became known as the Fugu Plan – the initiative cited in those papers discovered by Tokayer. Like the poisonous Japanese fish delicacy from which it borrowed its name, supporters believed this opportunity and the Jews, though dangerous if mishandled, could be highly valuable if dealt with correctly.
A colony of refugee Jews… dropped halfway around the world… on behalf of Japan? The plan was a strange mixture of humanitarian possibility, imperial ambition, and dark cultural misunderstanding whose authenticity is still questioned today. But it emerged at precisely the moment when much of the world was closing its doors to Jews. And remarkably, it had the potential to change the trajectory for countless people and maybe even the war itself.
Ultimately, the plan never progressed past the proposal stages. Formulated in 1934 and even debated among Japanese government ministers through 1938, it could not compete with the evolving reality. American Jewish leaders would not really promote the initiative among other Jews as they were suspicious of Japan’s aggressive mistreatment of conquered populations. Japan allied itself with Nazi Germany and Italy in September 1940, and overtly aiding European Jews would have jeopardized that crucial partnership, so the plan was shelved. After Japan entered the war, all its resources were naturally turned to concentrating on that effort instead.
One door slides closed. Another door slides open.
While the plan itself never came to fruition, the dialogue leading up to it meant the Japanese government had, in the late 1930s and early 40s, laxer restrictions for entry and lingering sympathies that enabled Jewish refugees to enter Japan and afterwards settle in Japanese-controlled Shanghai.
Some of the stories that surround this are quite well known. One workaround escape route from Europe was carved out for some refugees by presenting as their final destination the Dutch island of Curaçao which had a visa loophole; when they transited through Japan, they remained there. Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese consul in Lithuania, ignored orders from Tokyo and issued thousands of transit visas to Jews trying to escape. Hundreds of students from the Mir Yeshiva in Belarus passed through Japan as they fled Europe and eventually ended up resurrecting the institution in Shanghai. Ultimately, up to 25,000 Jews escaped to Japan and China during the period.
Meanwhile, the strange Fugu Plan that never-was faded away in the chaos of the war and its aftermath. Knowledge of it might have remained a little-known historical footnote, eventually disappearing perhaps.
But then a young rabbi named Marvin Tokayer came across the story.
Learning about the Fugu Plan motivated him to do more research and write a book by that name, preserving what might-have-been and telling this “Untold Story of the Japanese and the Jews During World War II.” Tokayer’s path brought him to write more than twenty books in Japanese about Jewish subjects, including one on Jewish jokes. It also led to an even more expansive interest in stories of Jews in the Far East, reflected in another English book, Pepper Silk & Ivory.
The starting point, the Fugu Plan, was peculiar, farfetched, and ultimately abandoned before it even got started. But nonetheless, one rabbi, finding himself on the other side of the world and stumbling upon it, pulled back new layers into a fascinating time and cultural framework. It revealed a period of global war, chaos, and desperation in which a twist of fate made all the difference between one reality taking shape versus another.
