In the course of my research on the obscure history of Japanese merchant marines during WW2, I visited War Memorial Maritime Museum in Kobe in May.
Kobe is one of the greatest port cities in Japan, perhaps next only to Yokohama. The city had been hit by a major earthquake in 1995, which destroyed half the historic waterfront district with trade houses, warehouses and offices. I saw that the whole area had been beautifully restored and re-developed. The museum is housed in the Kansai district headquarters, Japanese Seamen's Union.
The museum is about forgotten sailors who made ultimate sacrifices during WW2. They were probably the least responsible for the outbreak of war and yet paid much higher prices than the rest of Japanese population. (The militarist army officers, who were perhaps most responsible, were often recruited out of farming communities. And of course, very few seamen and fishermen became politicians...) Figures vary, but the safe estimate is that roughly half the seamen who participated in war lost their lives. Considering that even the suicidal Japanese army lost only 20% or so, this is an amazingly high figure. (Sure, in isolated defensive positions such as Iwo Jima, the Army suffered a virtually 100% loss rate; yet the main bulk of the Japanese Army in China, numbering more than a million, were safe and sound until the Soviets attacked them. Even then, it was only a small number of die-hards who fought to the last man. Many chose to flee; many were captured alive either by the Soviets or Communist Chinese.) To add insult to injury, the Japanese government and the military did not even acknowledge their sacrifices.
This museum was opened only in August, 2000. When I visited there, hoping to use documents and books, I was greeted by an old man whom I first mistook for a visitor. He explained that several retired seamen look after the museum. But he had no personal experience of war: all seamen who actually fought WW2 and survived are now simply too old. Some journalists are trying to get their stories, but they can no longer speak coherently or remember details from 70 years ago. The war is fading from people's memory now.
I got as-a-matter-of-fact records of what ships were lost during the war. Stats are rather confused, and I kept encountering different figures for the numbers of lost ships and seamen. There was even a set of data including ships and men lost due to mines laid during the war even after the cessation of hostilities, inflating these figures a lot. But safe to say that at least 3,500 ships were sunk and more than 60,000 seamen who did not belong to the army or the navy lost their lives; plus more than 170,000 'passengers', that is, both civilian and military personnel on board civilian ships, died at sea.
On the other hand, among the book collections, there were several collections of personal accounts, which are full of emotional, in your face type of telling of experience of war. They do not describe particulars of their last voyages - I felt a bit helpless, as I could not get much information on their dates, course of the ships or losses suffered in American attacks. It does not matter - to them, the story was simple: they sailed out, headed for some south Pacific island, knowing that it was infested with Americans, and then suddenly, the ship would explode with or without warning. The sailor would find himself in the water, and, if he was lucky enough, he'd be plucked out of water by an escort ship. He'd feel even sorry for surviving, as very few were lucky to be rescued; some cursed the escorting warship, who turned tail and bailed ('too dangerous to linger'). Most stories follow this line. The rest is their personal thoughts and what song they sang with their shipmates, etc. etc. Not very helpful for fact finding research mission of mine, but, their emotional responses to the impossible situation from which they could not extricate themselves is a very important part of this sorry story in itself.
The Japanese are often very self-absorbed, self-gratiating type of people; during the war, they considered themselves as warrior heroes that you might encounter in epic novels and movies depicting the world before writing was invented. So, they looked down on people - friend and foe alike - who were not 'warriors'. The idea of protecting civilians was unthinkable. To us moderns, fortified with theories of war, this is utterly astonishing. The whole point of fighting war is to protect your women and children; the rationale for navy is to protect merchant shipping so that your nation's commercial and economic health would not suffer in war. Both the British Royal Navy and the US Navy were built for the purpose of commerce protection at sea, and went on to become greatest navies in history as their nations' economy expanded. Yet the Japanese totally missed or just ignored this. To them, the modern armed forces were some sort of prestigious, luxury items to acquire as their country got richer and more powerful. As if buying a Mercedes Benz or something. They did not think much about exactly what they were trying to accomplish with such expensive purchases. Winning a battle for the sake of winning is the only thing, and to that end, they were even willing to use civilians as human shields (as witnessed in Okinawa) so that the 'warriors' could get their satisfaction of killing more enemy.
Given this culture, it is not so surprising that the Japanese navy failed to provide protection with merchant ships and transports; the army men treated these Japanese sailors worse than they do dogs. The old man at the museum told me that the sailors in wartime were in fact told that their lives came after those of warhorses and carrier pigeons.
Unlike the Allies, the Japanese failed to develop an effective and efficient auxiliary fleet. Plus intense rivalries between the army and the navy meant that there was little coordination between them for sea transport operations and even amphibious assaults. (One destroyer captain effectively said, he didn't want to die uselessly while his destroyer squadron, which was supposed to sink American warships with their torpedoes, accompanied slow and cumbersome army transports!) It is only because the Allied powers had little defence in their colonies that the Japanese succeeded during the opening months of the war. Even then, the counter-attacking US and British fighter planes had field days, sinking transport ships in droves. So, when the Allies gained an upper-hand from the late 1942, what the Japanese seamen had to go through was nothing but sheer hell.
Reading accounts by these sailors, what strikes me is that they hated the Japanese leaders as well as the enemy. They naturally hated American bombers and submarines for sinking them with impunity; whenever they managed to down an American plane, they would feel that some justice was finally done. But these sailors resented the Japanese military guys almost equally, who did not bother even to give them any weapon to fight back and treated them as being expendable. Some big transport ships got some AA guns, and often they made an air raid painful for the Americans. Yet, so many Japanese ships were without any anti-air or anti-submarine weapons. Once attacking American warplanes realised that, they would lesuirely strafe from top mast level. Japanese sailors could even see faces of the pilots clearly. They felt it is not just their ship that was being destroyed but their dignity and pride too.
After the war, their effort and sacrifice were forgotten. The media does not give much attention to these sailors either. Even History Channel and National Geographic, running documentary programmes about many different aspects of WW2, failed to cover the Japanese merchant seamen (as far as I know; though I must admit I don't watch every single episode of History or National Geographic TV!), even though the Battle of the Atlantic got a lot of airtime.
This new museum in Kobe was dedicated to the memories of these forgotten seamen, but, there hasn't been any high-profile campaign to raise public awareness even in Japan. The old sailors do not seem to think worthwhile, when the younger generations of the Japanese don't know about even the atomic bombing of Japanese cities and don't care, or, perhaps because it is just too late for changing their lives with better public recognition. But they are trying to preserve the memory in a quiet, very Japanese way. One historian has been building model ships of passenger liners, fishing boats and cargo ships that were sunk during the war, by the request of the relatives of seamen lost onboard. There are nearly a hundred now.
In the museum, the main display shows hundreds of pictures of the lost ships.
Sadly, very few people seem to be visiting this place. Just after the opening of it in 2000, some school visits were organised, but, soon, the museum has been forgotten. The day I paid my visit, there were only three other visitors. (But then, it was just after the May holiday weekend ended...)
The website is:
www.jsu.or.jp/siryo/
Unfortunately it is all in Japanese, but you get pictures of Japanese ships being sunk from the US National Archives on this site.
Kobe is one of the greatest port cities in Japan, perhaps next only to Yokohama. The city had been hit by a major earthquake in 1995, which destroyed half the historic waterfront district with trade houses, warehouses and offices. I saw that the whole area had been beautifully restored and re-developed. The museum is housed in the Kansai district headquarters, Japanese Seamen's Union.
The museum is about forgotten sailors who made ultimate sacrifices during WW2. They were probably the least responsible for the outbreak of war and yet paid much higher prices than the rest of Japanese population. (The militarist army officers, who were perhaps most responsible, were often recruited out of farming communities. And of course, very few seamen and fishermen became politicians...) Figures vary, but the safe estimate is that roughly half the seamen who participated in war lost their lives. Considering that even the suicidal Japanese army lost only 20% or so, this is an amazingly high figure. (Sure, in isolated defensive positions such as Iwo Jima, the Army suffered a virtually 100% loss rate; yet the main bulk of the Japanese Army in China, numbering more than a million, were safe and sound until the Soviets attacked them. Even then, it was only a small number of die-hards who fought to the last man. Many chose to flee; many were captured alive either by the Soviets or Communist Chinese.) To add insult to injury, the Japanese government and the military did not even acknowledge their sacrifices.
This museum was opened only in August, 2000. When I visited there, hoping to use documents and books, I was greeted by an old man whom I first mistook for a visitor. He explained that several retired seamen look after the museum. But he had no personal experience of war: all seamen who actually fought WW2 and survived are now simply too old. Some journalists are trying to get their stories, but they can no longer speak coherently or remember details from 70 years ago. The war is fading from people's memory now.
I got as-a-matter-of-fact records of what ships were lost during the war. Stats are rather confused, and I kept encountering different figures for the numbers of lost ships and seamen. There was even a set of data including ships and men lost due to mines laid during the war even after the cessation of hostilities, inflating these figures a lot. But safe to say that at least 3,500 ships were sunk and more than 60,000 seamen who did not belong to the army or the navy lost their lives; plus more than 170,000 'passengers', that is, both civilian and military personnel on board civilian ships, died at sea.
On the other hand, among the book collections, there were several collections of personal accounts, which are full of emotional, in your face type of telling of experience of war. They do not describe particulars of their last voyages - I felt a bit helpless, as I could not get much information on their dates, course of the ships or losses suffered in American attacks. It does not matter - to them, the story was simple: they sailed out, headed for some south Pacific island, knowing that it was infested with Americans, and then suddenly, the ship would explode with or without warning. The sailor would find himself in the water, and, if he was lucky enough, he'd be plucked out of water by an escort ship. He'd feel even sorry for surviving, as very few were lucky to be rescued; some cursed the escorting warship, who turned tail and bailed ('too dangerous to linger'). Most stories follow this line. The rest is their personal thoughts and what song they sang with their shipmates, etc. etc. Not very helpful for fact finding research mission of mine, but, their emotional responses to the impossible situation from which they could not extricate themselves is a very important part of this sorry story in itself.
The Japanese are often very self-absorbed, self-gratiating type of people; during the war, they considered themselves as warrior heroes that you might encounter in epic novels and movies depicting the world before writing was invented. So, they looked down on people - friend and foe alike - who were not 'warriors'. The idea of protecting civilians was unthinkable. To us moderns, fortified with theories of war, this is utterly astonishing. The whole point of fighting war is to protect your women and children; the rationale for navy is to protect merchant shipping so that your nation's commercial and economic health would not suffer in war. Both the British Royal Navy and the US Navy were built for the purpose of commerce protection at sea, and went on to become greatest navies in history as their nations' economy expanded. Yet the Japanese totally missed or just ignored this. To them, the modern armed forces were some sort of prestigious, luxury items to acquire as their country got richer and more powerful. As if buying a Mercedes Benz or something. They did not think much about exactly what they were trying to accomplish with such expensive purchases. Winning a battle for the sake of winning is the only thing, and to that end, they were even willing to use civilians as human shields (as witnessed in Okinawa) so that the 'warriors' could get their satisfaction of killing more enemy.
Given this culture, it is not so surprising that the Japanese navy failed to provide protection with merchant ships and transports; the army men treated these Japanese sailors worse than they do dogs. The old man at the museum told me that the sailors in wartime were in fact told that their lives came after those of warhorses and carrier pigeons.
Unlike the Allies, the Japanese failed to develop an effective and efficient auxiliary fleet. Plus intense rivalries between the army and the navy meant that there was little coordination between them for sea transport operations and even amphibious assaults. (One destroyer captain effectively said, he didn't want to die uselessly while his destroyer squadron, which was supposed to sink American warships with their torpedoes, accompanied slow and cumbersome army transports!) It is only because the Allied powers had little defence in their colonies that the Japanese succeeded during the opening months of the war. Even then, the counter-attacking US and British fighter planes had field days, sinking transport ships in droves. So, when the Allies gained an upper-hand from the late 1942, what the Japanese seamen had to go through was nothing but sheer hell.
Reading accounts by these sailors, what strikes me is that they hated the Japanese leaders as well as the enemy. They naturally hated American bombers and submarines for sinking them with impunity; whenever they managed to down an American plane, they would feel that some justice was finally done. But these sailors resented the Japanese military guys almost equally, who did not bother even to give them any weapon to fight back and treated them as being expendable. Some big transport ships got some AA guns, and often they made an air raid painful for the Americans. Yet, so many Japanese ships were without any anti-air or anti-submarine weapons. Once attacking American warplanes realised that, they would lesuirely strafe from top mast level. Japanese sailors could even see faces of the pilots clearly. They felt it is not just their ship that was being destroyed but their dignity and pride too.
This new museum in Kobe was dedicated to the memories of these forgotten seamen, but, there hasn't been any high-profile campaign to raise public awareness even in Japan. The old sailors do not seem to think worthwhile, when the younger generations of the Japanese don't know about even the atomic bombing of Japanese cities and don't care, or, perhaps because it is just too late for changing their lives with better public recognition. But they are trying to preserve the memory in a quiet, very Japanese way. One historian has been building model ships of passenger liners, fishing boats and cargo ships that were sunk during the war, by the request of the relatives of seamen lost onboard. There are nearly a hundred now.
In the museum, the main display shows hundreds of pictures of the lost ships.
Sadly, very few people seem to be visiting this place. Just after the opening of it in 2000, some school visits were organised, but, soon, the museum has been forgotten. The day I paid my visit, there were only three other visitors. (But then, it was just after the May holiday weekend ended...)
The website is:
www.jsu.or.jp/siryo/
Unfortunately it is all in Japanese, but you get pictures of Japanese ships being sunk from the US National Archives on this site.
