The wife of Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat who helped thousands of Jews flee Nazi persecution, on Wednesday sued a Tokyo publisher over a book she claims libels her dead husband.
Yukiko Sugihara asked the Tokyo District Court to halt sales of the book and demanded 10 million yen in damages.
The book, "Chiune," is the Japanese translation of "In Search of Sugihara," written by Hillel Levine, a Boston University professor, published in August 1998. Its translated version is put out by Shimizu Shoin Co.
Sugihara has complained the book contains more than 300 distortions and fabrications about her husband. She disputes, for example, the author's claim that Sugihara presented himself as a hero by asserting he had acted in defiance of his government.
In 1940, Chiune Sugihara issued about 2,000 transit visas to Jews at the Japanese Consulate in Lithuania against the wishes of the Foreign Ministry. He was asked to resign from the ministry after the war, and died in 1986.
The government honored him on the centennial of his birth in 2000. Sugihara is referred to in Japan as the "Japanese Schindler," after Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who worked to save Jews during World War II and on whose life the 1993 movie "Schindler's List" was based.