He talked it over with his wife, Yukiko.
"We understood that both the Japanese and German governments disagreed with our ideas," she recalled later, "but we went ahead anyhow."
Sugihara was 40 years old. He had been sent to Lithuania in November 1939, the first Japanese diplomat ever posted there. People found the name Chiune hard to say, so he went by another reading of it: Sempo.
On July 18, 1940, he began writing visas.