Sugihara Chiune (Japanese: 杉原千畝) [01/01/1900 - 31/07/1986] was a Japanese diplomat, married to Yukiko, with 4 sons. The third son, Haruki, was born in Kaunas, at the P. Mažylis Clinic, in May 1940.

From 1939 to 1940 he served as Japanese Vice-Consul in Kaunas, where he issued Japanese transit visas in July-August 1940, when Lithuania was under Soviet occupation, thus saving several thousand war refugees, mostly Jews, from Poland. Sugihara's official visa list contains 2139 names.

Photo taken in 1944, Bucharest, for a Romanian newspaper.

In the summer of 1940, a non-agreed cooperation with the Dutch Honorary Consul in Kaunas, Jan Zwartendijk, enabled the rescue of several thousand World War II refugees with transit visa from Japan and destination visa from the Dutch colonies in the Caribbean Sea.

In 1968, C. Sugihara was first found by his rescuer in Kaunas, Yoshua Nishri, who was himself working as a diplomat at the Israeli Embassy in Tokyo at the time. From this meeting, C. Sugihara's story as a savior of Jews began to be published. C. Sugihara is sometimes referred to as the Schindler of Japan.

In 1984, Yad Vashem awarded him the title of Righteous Among the Nations for saving Jews from the Holocaust.

In the summer of 1940 in Kaunas, seeing hundreds of refugees waiting at the consulate, C. Sugihara asked Tokyo whether it had the right to issue Japanese transit visas en masse. After a delay, Sugihara took the initiative to issue visas en masse. As part of this work, a reply came from the Japanese Foreign Ministry:

ON AN EARLIER ENQUIRY ABOUT SERVICE VISAS. STOP. IT IS ADVISABLE NOT TO ISSUE VISAS TO ANY APPLICANT UNLESS HE/SHE HAS A FINAL EXIT VISA, WHICH WOULD GUARANTEE HIS/HER FINAL DEPARTURE FROM JAPAN. STOP. NO EXCEPTIONS CAN BE MADE. STOP. NO FURTHER ENQUIRIES ARE EXPECTED. STOP. K TANAKA FOREIGN MINISTRY TOKYO.

[Yukiko Sugihara, Visas for Life, 1995, 13]

Such unconventional behavior of Sugihara distinguished him not only from the Japanese tradition of subordination, but also from other diplomats operating in Kaunas, who, with the exception of Mr. Zwartendijk, did not cooperate on the issue of refugees, or did so minimally.

Sugihara and his family in Kaunas in the summer of 1940, with W. Gudze, a local German and secretary of the Japanese Consulate, standing behind them.