Yuiyoshida gets a letter in the mail from the United States State department

[Person 2713]

9. That's why a century ago some bought their own ticket to Shanghai and didn't stick around

to find out how bad it could get for them at home, left before genocide and war and they survived in welcoming Shanghai only to then see Japan invade China

http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/shanghais-forgotten-jewish-past/281713/
Before Nazi policy turned actively genocidal in the late 1930s, exile was seen as a perfectly acceptable solution to the “Jewish problem” and German and Austrian Jews, stripped of their citizenship rights, property, and employment, were encouraged to emigrate to any country that would have them. Unfortunately, there were few options for these would-be emigrants: At the Évian Conference in 1938, the great powers collectively decided to shut their borders to all but a small selection of Jewish refugees.

Aside from the Dominican Republic, Shanghai was the only place that remained open to these refugees, and 20,000 or so European Jews found their way to the city in the late 1930s. Shanghai at the time was a political anomaly: Control was split between the beleaguered Republic of China, an increasingly aggressive Imperial Japan, and France, Britain, and the United States, countries that operated self-governing “concessions” exempt from Chinese law or influence.

When the Second World War broke out in 1939, more European Jews had taken refuge in Shanghai than in any other city in the world.