In previous work on this subject, I suggested that the ‘Shibata Affair’ during the summer of 1942 in Shanghai, could have taken place in a completely different way to that described in The Fugu Plan (1979) by Marvin Tokayer and Mary Shwartz and reproduced since then in numerous writings on the Jewish residents in the Far East during the World War II.
Shortly after my completing the article (October 2017), a fortuitous coincidence allowed me to discover unpublished documents of the Naval captain Toshiro Saneyoshi (1886-1973), who led the Special Investigation Department in the Naval Attaché's Office in Shanghai from April 1942 to June 1943. His task was nothing less than settling Jewish issues properly in the post-Pearl Habour context. And his diaries, written in Japanese and in English, and the letters to his wife in Tokyo cover the complete range of his Department's activities.
Analysis of these newly obtained documents clearly demonstrates that some Shanghai Jewish community leaders seriously tried to abort, not a Josef Meisinger's fictional extermination plan, but a real initiative of forced relocation to a specific area. At the time, Saneyoshi was indeed pursuing this measure along with his two subordinates, Tsutomu Kubota (1895-1975) and Masahiko Sekiya (1904-1994).
A critical and multilingual edition of Saneyoshi documents is to be hoped for further in-depth historical research on the relationship between the Shanghai Jewish community and the local Japanese authorities.