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Just next to a Starbucks in downtown Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo sits a bronze statue of a man in a suit holding a small piece of paper.
On the base is a phrase from the Talmud: “He who saves one life, saves the entire world.” The memorialized man is Chiune “Sempo” Sugihara, often referred to as the “Japanese Schindler.” A Japanese diplomat tasked with opening a consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1939, Sugihara ended up defying his own government and put his family at risk by issuing 2,139 transit visas to some 6,000 Jews who had migrated to Lithuania after the Nazis invaded Poland, and again needed to migrate or else face execution.
In Los Angeles, thousands pass this statue each day without knowing anything about the man who saved thousands of lives roughly 70 years ago.
Sugihara’s largely overlooked story is now being told on the big screen in the form of an emotional and sweeping biopic directed by J