It wasn't easy to leave Vladivostok. But, my journey had to go on, and Veronika had to go home. So we packed up our things. She got on a plane, and I got on a boat. After two days of chugging across the Sea of Japan (and two very interesting hours in South Korea), I find myself disembarking in Sakaiminato. My feet find the ground and I'm off again. I take a deep breath and think: "and now for something completely different." After Russia, Japan is quite the culture shock. I don't know what all the rules are here, yet, but I do know that it's very, very impolite to break them. Maybe I'll learn, but my first few hours don't seem like the best omen. My very first train ride in this country, for example, contains one of the rarest of Japanese transit phenomenonae: an unexpected delay. We're somewhere in Okayama prefecture, about an hour and a half from the city of the same name, when the train pulls into a teeny-tiny countryside station. Not surprisingly, it stops. But then, the stop gets longer. And longer. After about thirty minutes, I'm starting to get worried. There have been several announcements in Japanese, and people are starting to look annoyed. I don't speak the language, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell that what's happening is something strange. Then, all of a sudden, everyone gets off of the train. I don't know what I'm doing, but I follow them. Waiting outside are three charter buses which I gather have been specially requisitioned to ferry us to Okayama. One of the bus drivers grabs me and steers me onto a bus in which every seat is full. I look around, confused, and the bus driver smiles. Then, he pulls out a small...well, I'm not sure I can call it a seat. It's more of a stool that folds out of another seat, reaching into the aisle. Honestly, I'm pretty excited not to be stranded in rural Okayama, so I sit down and settle in. The bus is completely packed with Friday afternoon commuters trying their very best to get home, a sweet old man that speaks a little English, and me. With a lurch, we set off. Two and a half hours later, we arrive at Okoyama Station. I'm just happy it didn't take three. Japanese traffic is nasty, I found out, especially on Friday afternoons. And that's coming from a Houstonian. So went my first day in Japan. The next morning, I ride the trains down to Fukuyama to meet my family at the Holocaust Education Center, the only Holocaust Museum in all of Japan. Keep in mind, though, that Japan has a Jewish population of about 200 people. The museum directors know the three of us are coming, and they kindly meet my mother, my sister, and myself at Fukuyama Station and drive us out to the Center. In some ways, the HEC follows all of the rules when it comes to Holocaust museums. Clean, modern architecture with a color scheme built on the contrast between large, dark stones, white plaster, and plenty of exposed steel and plate glass. The exhibition, as well, follows the characteristic formula of stark sparsity, pulling few punches and adding few flourishes. There are a few unusual elements, though. There is an entire exhibition devoted to Ann Frank, for example, complete with a full-sized reproduction of her diary and her attic hiding place. Anne Frank is extremely popular in Japan, one of the directors explains. Focusing on her story is one of the primary tactics the museum staff uses to connect with Japanese school children. I wonder how well it works as I examine the 'Diary of Anne Frank' manga on display in the museum's gift shop. The other unusual aspect of the museum, of course, is their emphasis on the story of Chiune Sugihara. To them, our visit is fairly important. We are living proof of their thesis that Sugihara's actions effectively saved the lives of many more people than the original 2,000 visa recipients. They saved the lives of each of the Sugihara Survivor's decedents, people like my sister and myself. Consequently, a few reporters from a small local paper were invited to interview us and take photographs as we toured the museum...and they took that job very seriously. Every time we stopped in front of an image or a display, a photograph was made. It's a surreal experience, touring a museum where you know most of the information by heart, looking at terrible images that you have seen many times, in many ways, each of them recalling the 20th century's most infamous genocide, and relentlessly getting your picture snapped. Not bad, exactly, but strange. In other places, we manage to maintain a lower profile. Or at least a different one. The following day, the three of us travel to Tsuruga, the rural port where the Finklesteins landed after leaving Vladivostok. Three confused looking foreigners, we got plenty of sideways glances. But no one bothered us as we reached the "Port of Humanity," a museum which chronicles the story of the Sugihara Survivors' arrival in Tsuruga. Leading up to the main exhibition was an explanation of the Trans-Siberian route the European refugees took, complete with pictures. Pictures that I recognized, because I had seen all of it with my own eyes. It was all there: Kaunas, Yaroslavsky Station, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Lake Baikal, Chita. Khabarosk. Vladivostok. And I'd crossed it all. The rest of the exhibit, though, was even more fascinating. It contained dozens of first-person accounts of the refugees' arrival in Tsuruga. Here was my grandmother's family, seen through the eyes of their Japanese counterparts. Every time an account mentioned a small child, a little girl, travelling in someone's arms or walking beside her family, I had to wonder. Was this an echo, a memory of my grandmother? Was this a random, chance moment, a sighting across a street, transmitted by mouth and memory across all of these years? Our last Sugihara-related stop in Japan was Yaotsu-town, the little hamlet in Gifu Prefecture in which Sugihara-san was born. Our agenda: a visit to a third museum, this one possibly the most detailed and unique, and a private lunch with the town's mayor. The museum was fascinating. We spoke with an expert on the visas who explained Sophie's passport to us. Stories, each of them hidden in the yellowing paper and fading ink, emerged and made themselves known. Across the years, we heard one woman's desperate voice. No money, no visa, desperately searching for a way out, a way to save herself, her husband, and her child.
And now, almost eighty years later, the three of us are standing here, looking at her picture in a museum. What other secrets do those dark eyes hold? What stories have we lost? All of those secrets a passport can't tell. Just some thoughts from Japan, Sonia
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There's a lot to say about Vladivostok. But first, I need to talk about something called the JAO. Haven't heard of it? That's not surprising, considering its a tiny piece of land buried deep in the crevice of southeastern Russia. JAO stands for Jewish Autonomous Oblast, although less than 1% of the current population is actually Jewish. But the story goes back a little farther than the present day. Arguably, it goes back a thousand years or so, to the root of Russia's notorious historical anti-Semitism. For brevity's sake, though, let's start in a place more people know about: the Pale of Settlement. The Pale of Settlement, just for reference, was the sliver of land on the western edge of Imperial Russia in which Jews were allowed to maintain a residence. Permanent residence, however, didn't preclude frequent harassment and violence. Pogroms were frequent. A particularly vitriolic wave of carnage occurred, for example, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Many blamed the Jews for the murder of the Tsar, a view the Imperial government encouraged. Often the Jewish inhabitants of the Russian Empire were faced with a fairly binary decision: flee or die. Many went to the United States. Others went to Palestine, kicking off a wave of Jewish immigration to the region which would later be called the First Aliyah. For these Jews, as well as others that remained in Europe, the pogroms became a symbol of purpose for a growing Jewish nationalist movement. 'Zionism' in the case of Jews that wanted to place this Jewish nation in the Biblical Holy Land. Political Zionism in particular is the system of thought that won out in the years leading up to the creation of the modern state of Israel. But all of that is another very, very complicated story. Regarding the JAO, the most important things to remember are the pogroms and the growth of Jewish nationalism (not that nationalism was unique to European Jews--it was sort of in vogue at the time, if you remember your European history). Now, though, we move into the Soviet Era. The October Revolution and the Civil War tore the country apart. Jews and other minority groups, though, fared particularly poorly. After the Bolshevik government was established, the state policy of atheism and the criminalization of small business took a further toll on Russia's remaining Jewish population. By the time Stalin came to power, however, that population was still large enough to be both worrisome and geopolitically useful. Thus, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast was established in 1928 around Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East with these two goals in mind: 1) to provide a Soviet alternative to Palestine and Zionism and 2) to secure the sparsely populated region from infiltration courtesy of China and Japan. About 654 Jews were sent there in the spring of 1928 via the Trans-Siberian. By October, half of them had either fled or died. The Jewish population of the Oblast never rose much higher than fifty thousand people--the climate was harsh, survival was difficult, and only a few years after the founding of the JAO Stalin's infamous purges began. Jews living in the JAO were not spared. By 1948, though the Jewish population of the JAO had grown to comprise 25% of the regional population, Jews were barred from most professions and were not allowed to attend many institutions of higher education. These hardships, combined with the difficulty of living in the post-war Soviet Union, contributed to a mass exodus which only grew as the Soviet period ended. As of 2010, there were 1,600 people of Jewish descent living in the JAO. I write all of this because the train still passes through Birobidzhan. We stopped at the station, got out of the train and walked around. I saw all of this with my own eyes, and I had no idea of the history that resided there. How much else did I miss? I don't think I'll ever know. Vladivostok is an even bigger mystery. I think I could spend a lifetime here and know next to nothing about the city, relatively speaking. It's a lot like San Francisco, except with fewer people and more cigarette butts. Green hills roll against the shining blue background of the Pacific, contemptuous of the buildings which cling for dear life to their rocky backs. They're a mixed bag, the buildings. Some are old and some are new. Some are a lot newer than they look--Russian building practices don't tend to produce lasting results, especially when the structures in question whether eight months of winter next to the merciless sea. Consequently, crumbling concrete and peeling paint nestle up alongside late-Imperial storefronts and imposing Soviet blocks. Farther out from the city center, a lot of the construction begins to look a lot less...official. Shanties built from cinderblocks and corrugated metal roofing line the streets, fighting for coastline with the endlessly expanding McMansions of Russia's ultra-wealthy. My guess is neither group is up to code, but maybe I'm being overly cynical. Vladivostok is a shipping town, one of Russia's only warm-water ports. Officially, it was founded in 1860, soon after Imperial Russia acquired the territory from China via the rather one-sided Treaty of Beijing (big thank you to the British for facilitating that whole scene...ever heard of the Opium Wars? But anyway, my point is that the Qing Dynasty was in bad shape). It wasn't long before further hostilities broke out between the Russians and the Chinese in the region. Add in a the Russo-Japanese War, several years of Russians fighting Russians (the October Revolution, the Russian Civil War), a few puppet states (the Far East Republic, the Priamur Provisional Government), the restoration of Soviet rule and the fall of the Soviet Union, and you get the modern day Vladivostok. It is important to note, of course, that throughout much of that time the city was also home to the Russian navy's Pacific fleet. Consequently, it was closed to foreigners throughout much of the Soviet Era. It's a little surreal, now, to stand there today as an American tourist and casually take pictures of the Golden Horn Bay. Not that I didn't manage to have my own run in with the Russian authorities. It happened the first morning we were there, in fact. Our train arrived at Vladivostok station at about seven in the morning. There was a trek to the hostel, some much needed shower-power, and then Veronika and I found ourselves in the mood to celebrate. We'd just made it across the whole of Russia, after all. So Veronika suggested champagne, and I said why not. We walked to the Russian mini-mart and bought a bottle, then decided to drink it in Vladivostok's main polishite. Right beneath a giant memorial to the Russian soldiers that fought the Japanese back in 1922. Stellar idea, really. But anyway, we open our bottle, enjoy the fizz-for-all, and settle in on a park bench to enjoy our drink. About half the bottle is gone, and we're just starting to feel all warm and fuzzy, when two figures in black uniforms start to walk towards us. Emblazoned across their chests in yellow Cyrillic letters is the word 'politzia'. Well uh-oh. As it turns out, you can't drink in public in Russia, just like the U.S. The police look at us, look at our champagne, and then tell Veronika and I to follow them. An officer to each girl, we walk across the large open space of the square. My officer says something to me in Russian.
"Ne poonumayo po-Russky," I say. "Skazalesh?" he asks. "Niet." Well shit. Obviously, I'm an Amerikansky, but when we get to the police box there's no doubt. It's sort of a blue shipping container with a small police office inside. We take out our passports. The officers look at mine like I'm from another planet. "Interpol," one of the officers jokes. I laugh, but it comes out far to loud. While our passports get the third-degree, the officers start asking questions. Veronika does the talking. I didn't understand most of the conversation, but Veronika explained it later. I imagine it went a little like this: "What the hell are you doing here? How did an American and a Muscovite end up day drinking in Vladivostok?" "We took the train." "For seven days?!" "Technically it's only six." "Oh, well in that case. Why are you here?" "The American girl is tracing her grandmother's path out of Lithuania." "Ok, cool. But why?" "I don't really, know, but she's doing it." "You're both students?" "Yes." "Christ. Ok, well, here's what we're going to do. We're going to put your names on a list, that way our bosses know that we're doing something. But you're story is weird and its pretty boring working here, so we're going to let you go without doing anything else. Consider yourselves warned, don't do it again." "Yes, officer! Thank you!" *Veronika turns to me* "Nod your head and look happy," she says in English. "And say thank you!" "Spasiba bolshoya!" I scream. One of the officers escorts us out of the police box. "Oh, and watch out for your passports," he says in Russian. And just like that, we're in the main square once again, clutching our half-finished bottle of champagne. Vladivostok is a little like that, on reflection. It's a beach town that spends most of the year frozen solid, a cosmopolitan city with no metro, a reputation for provincial manners, and countless little rabbit holes one can find themselves lost down. It's Russian as Russian can be, and yet Moscow is literally on the other side of the world. As in, the distance between Vladivostok and Houston and the distance between Vladivostok and Moscow is roughly the same, clocking in at just over 9,000 km. And some how, some way, we're here. Some how, some way, this city exists. And it's beautiful, easily one of the most amazing cities I've ever seen. Dos Vadanya, Vladivostok. Ruler of the East, perhaps you are. But nevertheless, the journey goes onward, Sonia |
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