Nejiko Suwa

(23 January 1920 – 6 March 2012) was a Japanese violinist who earned fame as a child prodigy during the inter-war period. In early Shōwa Japan she was dubbed . Although her career was mostly confined to Japan and Europe, she posthumously became the source of controversy in the United States concerning the gift of what was claimed to be a Stradivarius violin by Joseph Goebbels, which possibly had been confiscated from its previous Jewish owner.

Early life

Suwa was born in Tokyo in 1920. Her father was a wealthy industrialist who ran a fertilizer factory in Yamagata Prefecture; her mother was an aspiring singer who had studied music at the .

By age 3, Suwa was found to have perfect pitch and could accurately sing back classical music records in her family's collection. Soon after Suwa was introduced to Nakajima Tazuruko, her first violin teacher. Progress was dramatic enough that Suwa was quickly sent to study with his teacher, the Russian-born violinist . In 1930, Suwa was introduced to Efrem Zimbalist while he was making his second Asian tour. Her performance of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto impressed him enough that the meeting made headlines in Japan. The Asahi Shimbun declared her the . Zimbalist recommended to Suwa that she study abroad and offered his assistance. She declined and chose to remain in Japan for six more years, studying under another Russian violinist, Alexander Mogilevsky.

On 9 April 1932, Suwa played her debut public recital at the Nippon Seinenkan in Tokyo and was hailed as a . The acrimonious separation of Suwa's parents in 1933 played out in the Japanese press. Suwa's mother claimed that she left the family home with her daughter on account of her husband's violence, although it was his infidelities which caused the rupture. The affair would later inspire a novel by Satomi Ton.

Between 1933 and 1935, Suwa recorded twenty-six 78 RPM sides for Nippon Columbia, accompanied on the piano by Ueda Masashi and Nadezhda Leuchtenberg.

After receiving interest in Suwa's playing from the Belgian Ambassador to Japan, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided in 1936 to sponsor her study abroad in Belgium with Boris Kamensky, to whom she had previously been introduced by her compatriot . When World War II broke out in 1939, Suwa decided to remain in Paris boarding with Kamensky's family instead of returning to Japan.

Wartime

In 1942, Kamensky petitioned the Japanese Embassy in France to care for Suwa, as he feared for the personal consequences he and his family could endure from the imminent Nazi occupation of Paris. There she met , a member of the embassy's staff whom she would later marry.

At the time, Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan were co-signatories of the Tripartite Pact; this permitted Suwa to continue working in Europe, including playing for wounded German soldiers. In her later career, she released recordings of Bach's Sonatas and Partitas and Beethoven's Kreutzer and Spring sonatas.

Fukada Yusuke wrote a book about the early part of her life in Europe which was made into a TV film for TV Asahi in 1985 in which the Japanese violinist Mariko Komuro played the role of the young Suwa.

Suwa died on 6 March 2012 at the age of 92 in her home in Tokyo.