This statue can be found in Little Tokyo at the corner of South Central Avenue and East Second Street. Chiune Sugihara was born on January First Nineteen Hundred and died on July Thirty-First Nineteen Eighty-Six. Sugihara is honored here for issuing paperwork that allowed more than six thousand Jewish Lithuanians to avoid Nazi concentration and death camps in World War Two. During an entire month near the end of Nineteen Forty, and despite being repeatedly denied permission by the Japanese government to do so, Sugihara and his wife Yukiko hand-wrote at least two thousand one hundred and forty visas that allowed Jewish families to leave Lithuania and travel through Russia to relative safety in Japan. In Nineteen Forty-Four, Sugihara and his family were arrested by the victorious Soviet Army and held captive for three years. The year before his passing, he was named “Righteous Among the Nations” by the State of Israel at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remeberance Authority. He is the only Japanese national to have received the title. In memoriam.
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