Under the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Japan and the Jews during the Holocaust Era by Meron Medzini

Abstract

Reviewed by: Under the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Japan and the Jews during the Holocaust Era by Meron Medzini Christopher L. Schilling (bio) Under the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Japan and the Jews during the Holocaust Era By Meron Medzini. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016. 220 pp. Under the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Japan and the Jews During the Holocaust Era is the newest book by Meron Medzini, an adjunct associate professor of modern Japanese history and Israeli foreign policy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he began teaching modern Japanese history in 1964. Among his previous publications, one finds "The Chinese Are Coming" and "Hands across Asia." The idea of this book is to describe what happened to Jewish people under Japanese rule during World War Two. It has been highly praised by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Irving M. Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies and professor of English and Jewish studies at Indiana University, who states, "Anyone wishing to learn about the fate of the Jews in Japan during the years of the Holocaust will gain immensely from reading this eye-opening book. Few people know this generally overlooked history as well as Meron Medzini and can tell its story in as authoritative and engaging a way as he." Ehud Harari, emeritus professor of Asian studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, goes even further by calling the book "a masterpiece that goes beyond its title. . . . Most notable is Medzini's conclusion that the attitude of the Japanese government and people toward the Jews was 'by and large fair and even humane.'" And in the Times of Israel on March 4, 2017, Sheldon Kirshner called Under the Shadow of the Rising Sun a "fine and fascinating work of scholarship" and identified Medzini as "one of the few scholars who has exhaustively delved into this intriguing topic. . . . Medzini's wide-ranging book fills the gap quite admirably." [End Page 195] Medzini expresses gratitude to Hagai Boaz and the heads of the Louis Frieberg Center for East Asia Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Gideon Shelach and Yuri Pines, for their support and for the scholarship awarded him to complete work on this book. Moreover, he writes, "I give special thanks to my colleagues and friends Professors Ben-Ami Shillony and Rotem Kowner for reading the entire text, making very useful comments, and saving me from errors. Those errors that may have remained are naturally my responsibility" (viii). Unfortunately, after reading Under the Shadow of the Rising Sun, one must hold Medzini responsible for errors and, indeed, for writing a very questionable book about the Holocaust and East Asian history that, in this form, should have been neither published nor praised by colleagues in the field. To begin with, one could argue that the title of the book, which calls the Holocaust an "era," was not very well chosen, because one horrific element of the Holocaust was that it happened in just a few years' time. Shockingly, it did not take an era to plan and murder millions of people, which is a lesson that one must take from it. Medzini then claims that there has been a "virtual silence" on the topic of antisemitism in Japan (vii), even though scholars such as David G. Goodman, Masanori Miyazawa, Hiroshi Ichikawa, Ben-Ami Shillony, Steven Levine, and David Kranzler have worked extensively on the topic of Japan and the Jewish people for decades. On the contrary, Medzini calls Marvin Tokayer, who "provided some much-needed advice," a "pioneer in the study of Japan and the Jews" (viii). Tokayer, a rabbi and author of The Fugu Plan (1979), makes a living by publishing books in East Asia on the Talmud, which are more comics than real textbooks. After his first book, published in Japan, on "5,000 Years of Jewish Wisdom: Secrets of the Talmud Scriptures," he went on to publish more than twenty books on Judaism in Japan, covering topics such as the Talmud, Jewish education, humor, and sex dreams. For most of these books, Hideaki Kase served as Tokayer's translator, since he was not able to speak Japanese himself. Kase is now chairman of the Society...