An Ottoman frigate sailed for Japan in 1889 carrying a medal for the Emperor and eleven months of bad luck. She arrived. On the way home she met a typhoon off the Kii Peninsula and broke apart on a reef below the Kashinozaki lighthouse, a few miles short of shelter. More than five hundred men died. Sixty-nine were pulled out of the rocks by villagers who had almost nothing to give them.
That night is now the founding story of the relationship between Turkey and Japan — taught in Turkish schools, filmed, commemorated every five years at the cemetery above the wreck. It is a good story, and like most good stories it has been improved. These accounts try to keep the events and mark the seams: what the record supports, what the retellings added, and what is still being brought up off the seabed.
The story, in order
The order to sail
How a courtesy call from a Japanese prince put a twenty-five-year-old wooden frigate on the far side of the world.
Four days in a typhoon
She sailed from Yokohama in good weather. Within twenty-four hours the wind had turned, and the next four days were spent losing an argument with the sea.
Sixty-nine
A lighthouse, a poor village on a cape, and the several weeks in which a shipwreck became a relationship.
The tea master's subscription
Yamada Torajirō raised money for the widows of Ertuğrul, carried it to Istanbul himself, and then stayed. The legend around him has since outgrown the record.
The last plane out of Tehran
In March 1985 a Turkish Airlines DC-10 flew into a city under a shoot-down warning to collect 215 Japanese civilians. Whether it was about 1890 is a better question than it looks.
What the seabed kept
Since 2007 archaeologists have been taking the ship apart on the seabed where she came apart on her own. What they keep finding is ammunition.
The real return
Both empires in this story were busy learning to measure themselves. A hundred and thirty-five years later, measuring honestly is still the hard part — and still worth the trouble.