An Academy Award-winning movie portraying a Japanese diplomat who helped Jews escape Nazi persecution inaccurately depicts the Foreign Ministry as supporting Adolf Hitler's final solution policy toward the Jews, a ministry official said.
"Visas and Virtues," a 26-minute film produced in 1997, stars Japanese-American actor and director Chris Tashima. Tashima portrays Consul to Lithuania Chiune Sugihara, caught between his moral convictions and government orders, issuing visas to help as many as 6,000 Jews flee Nazi persecution in 1940.
The movie ends with a scene where Sugihara is "disgraced" and fired from the ministry, strongly suggesting he was punished for issuing the visas. "The guidelines of the Foreign Ministry declared that all peoples, no matter what nationality or ethnicity, were to be treated equally," Masaaki Shiraishi of the Diplomatic Record Office told a meeting Thursday of the Japan Israel Chamber of Commerce held in Tokyo.