Jewish settlement in the Japanese Empire

Jewish settlement in Imperial Japan began as early as the middle of the nineteenth century, but was confined to relatively small numbers of immigrants from Europe and Russia. Shortly prior to and during World War II, and coinciding with the Second Sino-Japanese War, tens of thousands of Jewish refugees were resettled in the Japanese Empire. The onset of the European war by Nazi Germany involved the lethal mass persecutions and genocide of Jews, later known as the Holocaust, resulting in thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing east. Most ended up in Japanese-occupied China. Popular accounts of the resettlement plan have resurfaced in the 21st century on Chinese social media as an antisemitic conspiracy theory against China.