Did you know there was a Japanese gentleman
on board the RMS Titanic?
Born in Niigata-ken in 1870, Masabumi Hosono
graduated from Tokyo Higher Commercial School and, in 1897 started work at Japan's
Ministry of Communications. In 1906, he graduated from the Russian department
of the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages and, in 1910, was sent to Russia to
research their railway system.
Hosono was on his way home from this trip
when he boarded the Titanic.
On April 14, at 11:40 p.m., just four days
into its maiden voyage, the ‘unsinkable’ ship struck an iceberg while traveling
at near top speed and began taking on water. At first, few people knew there
was a problem, indeed Hosono slept through the entire thing in his second-class
cabin. At midnight, a crewman woke him and told him to put on his life vest
because the ship might be sinking.
Commonsense dictates that when a boat is
sinking, it's a good idea to get off. When Hosono tried to do so, guards twice
told him to go back to the lower levels of the ship. Naturally, it was women
and children first, but only if you had a first or second-class ticket, and had
white skin! On his third attempt, Hosono slipped past a crewman guarding the
way to the lifeboats.
Standing near Lifeboat No. 10, he watched
it being loaded. There weren't enough women and children from first or
second-class believing that the Titanic was going to sink, or perhaps they
didn’t want to leave their husbands and fathers.
"I tried to prepare myself for the
last moment with no agitation, making up my mind not to leave anything
disgraceful as a Japanese," he explained in a letter to his wife, "but
still I found myself looking for and waiting for any possible chance to
survive."
As there were no more women or children
left near lifeboat No.10, an officer shouted, "Room for two more!" Hosono
watched as an Armenian man quickly jumped in.
"I myself was deep in desolate thought
that I would no more be able to see my beloved wife and children, since there
was no alternative for me than to share the same destiny as the Titanic,"
he wrote. "But the example of the first man making a jump led me to take
this last chance."
So, Hosono jumped into the Lifeboat. “Fortunately
the men in charge were taken up with something else and did not pay much
attention. Besides, it was dark, and so they would not have seen who was a man
and who a woman.”
While the officers weren't paying much
attention to the color of his skin, the others on the boat did, later describing
him as a ‘Japanese stowaway’.
At 1:20AM, Hosonso and 34 other passengers
were lowered into the Atlantic Ocean in the Lifeboat (capacity 65). He began to
row with the only other male on board, and watched as the Titanic finally slipped
beneath the waves at 2:20AM.
Aboard the Carpathia rescue ship, he was
not just a survivor - he was a yellow-skinned Asian and the crew teased him. In
New York, the lack of interest in Hosono the survivor continued. He made his
way to the office of the Mitsui trading company where old school friends lent
him the money to travel home.
While waiting for a ship to leave San
Francisco, he told the Japanese community there his story. Back in Tokyo, he
gave an interview to the Yomiuri Newspaper, which also carried a photograph of
him with his family, and to a few other newspapers and magazines, then picked
up his life as best he could.
But apparently it’s not easy to survive a
disaster!
Hosono lost his job with the Ministry in
May 1913, but the government could not afford to drop such a highly trained
expert, who had just returned from a government-sponsored study trip abroad. He
was rehired the following month on a contract-basis, which continued until his
death in 1939.
But that’s not the whole story.
People began to wonder how some 162 women
and children were counted as dead after the Titanic went down, and yet 338 men
had managed to find their way onto lifeboats. Did they displace those women and
children to save themselves?
Guess who got the worst criticism?
While the Western media were critical of
the surviving men, Hosono was more or less ingnored. The strongest condemnation
came from his home country. This was 1912, remember, and the samurai had only
been dissolved for around 40 years! Hosono had broken two taboos:
1. He had chosen life over an honorable
death.
2. He had chosen life over death in public.
To the Japanese, Hosono had made Japan look
bad in the eyes of the world and was branded a coward, which was the reason he was
fired from his government job. Yes, he was rehired a month later, but the
damage was done – Hosono was never to recover his reputation.
Japanese university professors called him
immoral. An ethics textbook for girls in the 1910s condemned Hosono’s behavior stating
that it ‘disgraced Japan and the Japanese people’. Some suggested that he should
commit ritualistic suicide (hara-kiri) to reinstate to himself, his family and Japan.
His family was concerned about his
so-called cowardice, but Hosono wisely pointed out, “I am alive here and now,
what is wrong with that?”
Aside from the early days, Hosono refused
to talk about his experience aboard the Titanic, and died a broken and
forgettable man in 1939, which was okay by Japan as it didn't want to talk about
his cowardice and hoped the world would forget the country’s dishonor.
It's interesting to note that no country
other than Japan cared about Hosono's so-called dishonorable act, and despite
early newspaper accounts describing in detail the events presented here, Hosono
was largely a forgotten footnote in the history of the Titanic.
Now, a little over a 100 years since the
disaster, it's sad to recall the tragic loss of life, but it’s heart wrenching
to think of the hell one poor man was forced to endure for being a Titanic survivor!
The notes and letters Hosono wrote about
the event remained hidden at the bottom of a drawer until 1997 when his
granddaughter Yuriko made them public. Fascinatingly, they are written on
letter-headed stationary he took with him from the Titanic, and are believed to
be the only pieces of stationary to have survived the disaster.
Following the discovery of the letters, and
the success of the Titanic movie, Japan finally embraced Hosono - not as a coward
and a stain on the image of Japan - but as a survivor of the Titanic disaster.
David
