“The Serene Skies of Kobe”: Memories of the Kobe Jewish Refugee Community, 1940–1941

Abstract

In the early years of the Second World War, when the international community had effectively closed its doors to refugees, 4,608 European Jews found haven in Kobe, Japan. Although the Jewish refugee community in Japanese-occupied Shanghai has received attention in both the academic and popular spheres, its counterpart in Kobe has largely been overlooked. Nevertheless, refugees’ memories of Kobe are remarkably rich. In this paper, I analyze oral histories of the Jewish refugee experience in Kobe as examples of what Takashi Fujitani, Geoffrey White and Lisa Yoneyama call “critical memories.” Memories of the Jewish refugee experience in Kobe are, by the definition of Fujitani et al., “perilous” for two reasons. First, there are fewer and fewer alive to remember this often overlooked subset of Holocaust memories. And second, their memories challenge—or at least complicate—dominant memories of World War II, principally by recalling an instance of Japanese moral superiority on the international stage. I have asked not only how these oral histories challenge dominant memories, but also how power dynamics inform the memories articulated. To investigate this question, I use Michel Foucault’s definition of power in “The Subject and Power” as “a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others [but] upon their actions."