On a calm, cold night in April 1912, a 42-year-old Japanese bureaucrat committed an act that would destroy his career, ruin his reputation and torment his family for generations: he stayed alive.
By jumping into a lifeboat from the deck of the RMS Titanic, the sole Japanese aboard the doomed vessel saved his life but lost something his country prized far more.Denounced as a national disgrace for betraying the Samurai spirit of self-sacrifice, Masabumi Hosono died a broken man in 1939. He never spoke of Titanic, but now the long silence has been broken.
His descendants have uncovered a journal he wrote giving a detailed description of Titanic's last hours and how he avoided following it and more than 1,500 fellow passengers to a watery grave.
Hosono's diary was written with the shrieks of the drowning still ringing in his ears. The first page, which bears the printed legend "On board the RMS Titanic," starts as a letter to his wife in English. It then abruptly switches to Japanese to describe the horror that engulfed the ship after it hit an iceberg.
Written mostly in the rescue ship Carpathia, it's the only such document on Titanic stationery. His family hopes the text will help clear his name.
A frenzy of publicity in Japan for the recent Tokyo premiere of James Cameron's epic film "Titanic" provided an opportunity to reopen the case.
When Hosono's survival first became known, the American press celebrated his good fortune. "Lucky Japanese Boy," cheered a newspaper in San Francisco. Japan, though, was appalled.
For more than 80 years, Hosono has been cast as Japan's equivalent of Stanley Lord, the British captain of the California, a ship that failed to go to Titanic's rescue.
Hosono's diary tells how he was awakened by a knock on the door of his second-class cabin and raced outside. As a foreigner, he was ordered down into the lower decks, where the survival rate of steerage passengers was 25 percent, compared with 60 percent for those in first class and 45 percent in second.
Far from forcing their way into lifeboats, as an official U.S. inquiry and the accounts of mainly American and British survivors suggested, many foreigners irrespective of how much they had paid for their tickets - were herded into the lower deck.
"All the while flares signaling emergency were being shot into the air ceaselessly, and hideous blue flashes and noises were simply terrifying," Hosono wrote.
He made his way back to the upper deck. "I tried to prepare myself for the last moment with no agitation, making up my mind not to leave anything disgraceful as a Japanese. But still I found myself looking for and waiting for any possible chance for survival."
His chance came when an officer loading lifeboats shouted: "Room for two more." A man 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. But the example of the first man making a jump led me to take this last chance."
He jumped, and Japan has never forgiven him.