History of the Jews in Japan the end of Japan's "closed-door" foreign policy, Jewish families again began to settle in Japan. The first recorded Jewish settlers arrived at Yokohama in 1861. By 1895, this community, which by then consisted of about 50 families, established the first synagogue in Meiji Japan. Part of this community would later move to Kobe after the great Kanto earthquake of 1923. Another early Jewish settlement was established in the 1880s in Nagasaki, a large Japanese port city opened to foreign trade by the Portuguese. This community was larger than the one in Yokohama, consisting of more than 100 families. It was
1923 Great Kantō earthquake regional police and the Imperial Army used the pretext of civil unrest to liquidate political dissidents. Socialists such as (平澤計七), anarchists such as Sakae Ōsugi and Noe Itō, and the Chinese communal leader, (王希天), were abducted and killed by local police and Imperial Army, who claimed the radicals intended to use the crisis as an opportunity to overthrow the Japanese government. Director Chongkong Oh made two documentary films about the pogrom: "Hidden Scars: The Massacre of Koreans from the Arakawa River Bank to Shitamachi in Tokyo" (1983) and "The Disposed-of Koreans: The Great Kanto Earthquake and Camp Narashino" (1986). They