...The Japan Times, largest of the country's four English-language dailies, reported on its website Wednesday that the documents show that Japan's military issued a proclamation in February 1943 that the Jews living in Shanghai as "stateless refugees" be confined in one location.

The documents did not refer to the number of Jews confined in Shanghai, the Times reported. Hiroshi Bando, a professor emeritus at Meiji University who specializes in Jewish affairs, said they may have numbered more than 10,000.

The documents released for publication Wednesday said the order was made for military reasons as well as to ensure that Jewish merchants in Shanghai would "not engage in black-market operations and other illegal activities."...

...Bando said many newspapers and magazines in Shanghai were published by Jews and the reporting often ran counter to official Japanese views.

"That apparently angered the Japanese military," he said.

...Japan's Foreign Ministry launched an inquiry and determined that Japan had received "no communication nor instruction from local German authorities" where the Jews were confined by the Japanese military, the documents said.

According to reports, the government resisted determined and repeated requests from Nazi Germany to exterminate the Jews in the Shanghai ghetto.

The Japanese military began rounding up German Jews shortly after the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, came under Japanese occupation. By April 1944, 275 German Jews had been forced to live in restricted areas, according to the documents.

According to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs - an independent, non-profit institute for policy research and education, Japan's wartime Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuke told a group of Jewish businessmen, "I am the man responsible for the alliance with Hitler, but nowhere have I promised that we would carry out his anti-Semitic policies in Japan. This is not simply my personal opinion, it is the opinion of Japan, and I have no compunction about announcing it to the world."...