From her trading house in Yokohama she saved hundreds of genocide survivors fleeing across Siberia — and in 1920 became Armenia's consul to Japan, one of the first women diplomats on Earth.
Diana Apcar (1859–1937) may be the most remarkable Armenian woman most people have never heard of: a writer and businesswoman in Yokohama, Japan, who became the diplomatic representative of the First Republic of Armenia — making her one of the first women in the world appointed to a diplomatic post — and personally saved hundreds of genocide survivors.
Born Diana Aghabek in Rangoon to a merchant family of New Julfa descent and raised in Calcutta, she settled in Japan in 1891 with her husband's trading business. When he died, she ran it herself while raising three children — and writing prolifically: books, essays, and relentless appeals to the Western press on behalf of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire.
When genocide survivors began escaping east across Siberia after 1915, Yokohama became their unlikely door to freedom — and Diana Apcar became the door-keeper. She fed, housed, funded, and documented hundreds of refugees, shepherding them onto ships to America. In 1920, the First Republic named her honorary consul to Japan in recognition of what she had already been doing alone.
Stranded at the edge of Siberia, the survivors were told: get to Yokohama — there is an Armenian woman there who will save you.
— On Diana Apcar's rescue networkDescendants of the families she saved live across America today. Rediscovered by historians and honored in documentaries and exhibits from Yerevan to Yokohama, Diana Apcar stands as the genocide era's great one-woman humanitarian mission — and a founding name in the history of women in diplomacy.
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