Early Life
Chiune Sugihara was born 1 January 1900, in Yaotsu, a rural area in Gifu Prefecture of the Chubu region to a middle-class father, Yoshimi Sugihara (杉原好水 Sugihara Yoshimi), and Yatsu Sugihara (杉原やつ Sugihara Yatsu), an upper-middle class mother. He was the second son among five boys and one girl.
In 1912, he graduated with top honors from Furuwatari Elementary School, and entered Daigo Chugaku founded by Aichi prefecture (now Zuiryo high school), a combined junior and senior high school. His father wanted him to follow in his footsteps as a physician, but Chiune deliberately failed the entrance exam by writing only his name on the exam papers. Instead, he entered Waseda University in 1918 and majored in English language. At that time, he entered Yuai Gakusha, the Christian fraternity which had been founded by Harry Baxter Benninhof, a Baptist pastor. In 1919, he passed the Foreign Ministry Scholarship exam. The Japanese Foreign Ministry recruited him and assigned him to Harbin, China, where he also studied the Russian and German languages and later became an expert on Russian affairs.
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