When the writer John Toland interviewed Ohshima Hiroshi, Japan’s Ambassador to Germany, he sensed Hiroshi’s anxiety about Japan’s relationship with Germany. According to Toland, Hiroshi recalled that “Hitler didn’t know about Japan at first. In 1922 he wrote Mein Kampf in which he didn’t speak particularly well of Japan.” (This was a gross understatement.) Thus, during the war there was “not much done in cooperation” between the powers; they “exchanged information,” but not much more. Later Hiroshi asserted that “Goering complained to me saying that ‘your general is helping Jews in north Manchuria.’ I had it investigated and found it was true. The Jews never did any harm to Japan, therefore, there was no reason for us to reject them. Not only that Rothschild and Schiff but also in Germany such Jews as Greenburg had furnished military funds for Japan. …I further told Goering that Japan was using Jews who had escaped (from the Nazis) in such activities as collecting information on Russia (therefore they were useful).”

Hiroshi was not being misleading: Tokyo did diverge sharply from its alleged ally on the bedrock question of anti-Semitism. Dr. Karl Kinderman was Jewish and lived in Japan throughout the war. While there he “had been specially protected by Japanese friends who were high in the ranks of the…[ultra-patriotic] Black Dragon Society.” This was part of a larger Japanese plan not to participate in the incineration of Jews but to rescue them and deploy their resources and skills on behalf of Tokyo. A striking number of besieged German Jews—even antifascists—looked not to Europe or North America for refuge but to Japanese-occupied Asia. Japanese diplomats like the legendary Sugihara Chiune saved thousands of Jews on the eve of Shoah by issuing visas from European posts such as Lithuania. Solomon Bard, interned in Hong Kong, detected no anti-Semitism among his captors. They “made absolutely no effort to distinguish those in the camp who were Jews,” he recalled later, “Nazi doctrine in this respect did not reach as far as us.”