Sixty-nine

Kii Ōshima is an island off the tip of the Kii Peninsula, at the southern end of Wakayama. There was a lighthouse at Kashinozaki and, near it, a settlement that was not wealthy. Ōshima in 1890 was a place where a bad fishing season was a serious problem.

Men came out of the sea onto the rocks below it at midnight, in a typhoon, speaking no Japanese.

The rescue

The villagers went down to the rocks and pulled out who they could. They carried the survivors up, sheltered them, and fed them — and the detail that has carried the story for over a century is that they did this from stores they could not spare, for strangers from a country roughly nine thousand kilometres away, whose existence most of them would have had only the vaguest sense of. They then went back for the dead, recovered what bodies the sea gave up, and buried them properly.

Some of the more vivid framing — the village of sixty households, the specific scenes of sharing — comes to us through later retellings, and the 2015 film in particular. The documented core is not in dispute: local people conducted the rescue and the burials, and the Japanese reaction to the disaster was immediate and national.

Getting them home

The survivors were moved out in pieces. Two were taken to Kobe by Japanese ships, two more by a Japanese warship, and sixty-five by the German gunboat Wolf, which happened to be available and useful.

The return was the part Japan chose to make a statement of. All sixty-nine were carried back to Istanbul aboard two Japanese corvettes, Kongō and Hiei, which left Shinagawa in October 1890. This was not a cheap gesture. Japan was a rising naval power with a small fleet and a great many uses for two corvettes, and it sent them to the Bosphorus with sixty-nine foreign sailors aboard. Abdülhamid II met their officers on 5 January 1891 and decorated them.

Meanwhile, in Japan, a nationwide subscription had opened for the families of the dead — but that is the next story.

The cemetery

In February 1891 a cemetery was laid out near the lighthouse at Kushimoto for the hundred and fifty bodies recovered from the sea, with a memorial beside it. That site has been maintained ever since, and by people on both ends of it. Emperor Hirohito visited on 3 June 1929 and the cemetery was extended that year. Turkey renovated the monument in 1939. A Turkish memorial museum opened at Kushimoto in 1974, and the anniversary has been marked every five years since, with senior officials from both countries attending.

This is the part that deserves emphasis, because it is the part most often skipped in favour of the drama. The friendship did not simply happen on the rocks in 1890. It was maintained — deliberately, at some expense, by named people, across a century that gave both countries plenty of reasons to be distracted. A monument renovated in 1939 is a decision somebody made in 1939.

Wrecks are common. What is uncommon is a wreck that is still being visited a hundred and thirty-five years later by heads of state.