31

Persevering

Masabumi Hosono—the man who was accused simultaneously of being the Japanese “coward” the women of boat 13 conspired to throw into the sea and Colonel Archibald Gracie's “stowaway” who seaman Ed Buley said entered the lifeboat dressed as a woman—arrived home in Japan with nothing except his own good word as a defense against what by then had become newspaper gossip. Almost immediately, Hosono was dismissed from his job. Up until 1912, his work had supported him quite well, as indicated by his “Schedule A” listing of gold coinage and possessions lost aboard the Titanic, valued at twenty-five hundred dollars in 1912 (equivalent to more than a hundred thousand dollars a century later).

After the accusations and the firing, Hosono made a request of his family and his friends that they refrain from speaking to him about the Titanic or what the newspapers and the local gossip council were saying about him. He understood that no matter what he said, people would see only what they wanted to see and believe what they wanted to believe. Hearing of it could only depress and distract him. Sorrow and distraction would prevent him from trying to cobble his career back together so that he could provide his wife and his children with a future worth having. Decades later, his daughter Fumiko wrote that her father's request was never violated, largely because his family and his friends knew that he was a private, strong-willed, hardworking man who would do everything within his power to rise above the gossip.

Fumiko's father was also a talented man. By 1915, even his detractors at the Ministry of Railways realized that they needed him, and they hired him away from his “freelance, nonregular jobs” and from his design and upkeep of a rare and beautiful garden that reminded visitors of island pinnacles and river valleys sculpted in miniature.

Soon he began collaborations with a number of artists, in particular a self-reliant outcast named Gyotei Mano. During the difficult gossip years, Hosono commissioned Mano to paint landscapes and golden dragons on detachable sliding screens, with the probable intent, his daughter believed, of carrying something beautiful with him to their new smaller home, if and when he had to sell the family house. Fumiko remembered the bamboo bushes and snow-capped Mount Fuji on eight different silk sheets set in solid rosewood frames. In particular, she remembered “a majestic dragon that had cloud-piercing gold eyes and claws—each, on either side of the large partitioning screen.”

Eventually the Hosonos did have to move, to a house that Mr. Hosono designed and built near the Higashi-Nakano railway station in Nakano, Tokyo. With no guarantee that they would keep even this home, Hosono continued his collaboration with artists. He produced for each of his children two painted scrolls—among them Fumiko's long-remembered and cherished painting of pine trees and a flock of cranes set against the rising sun. Hosono was passing along not only his love of art and architecture but also gifts he hoped would become seeds to awaken any artistic talents in his children, or even in his children's children's children.

History tried to intervene again, naturally.

On September 1, 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake, ranging in magnitude from 7.9 to 8.3, leveled most of Tokyo and its surrounding areas, including Nakano. The port city of Yokohama, forty-six miles away from Tokyo, was also leveled. According to survivors' accounts, the clay earth moved like a storm at sea for a minimum of four minutes. Thirty-seven miles from the epicenter, the tremors displaced Kamakura's Great Buddha statue almost two feet. The statue was carved from a single block of stone and weighed ninety-three tons. More than a hundred thousand people were killed.

Japan's newspapers at the time were no more reliable than America's Hearst newspapers of the same period, with rumors and accusations promptly “scooped” as news. Quake-clouded well water led to rumors that Korean immigrants were poisoning wells, and the rumors were printed as news. This led to vigilante roadblocks throughout Tokyo and Yokahama, where (until the army intervened), passersby were being stopped and tested for accents and other indicators of ethnic identity. Many who failed to pronounce words properly were killed; the lucky ones were turned back whence they had come. Chinese, Okinawans, and even Japanese citizens who spoke Hiroshima's distinctive lilting dialect were often identified as foreigners.

Hosono, a speaker of foreign languages who had naturally developed an accent, faced significant danger if he attempted to travel. He stayed safely at his small, mostly intact home through fifty-seven aftershocks and the typhoon that quickly followed. The house must have been designed quite well. Like a lifeboat, it rode the waves of liquefaction. Every member of his family survived. Even his silk artwork endured unharmed.

During the next two years, Hosono's talents were needed full-time for the repair of the railway system. After two years of repairs, he began teaching engineering and continued to do so until he was stricken suddenly ill in 1939 at the age of sixty-eight.

According to Fumiko, despite her father's illness and “just days before his death, he had the grades for all of his students ready. Unable to go to the college, a school official came to him and [Father] handed him the list of marks. The act moved the official quite deeply.”

Six years later, on May 29, 1945, the region was leveled by one of World War II's largest B-29 firebomb raids. Once again, the Hosono family and the delicate silk paintings survived.

In the aftermath of World War II, Hosono's example of persevering, remaining fiercely independent no matter what anyone else thought, lived on within his family. Artistic abilities and a love of technology also seemed to live on. Hosono's grandson Haruomi Hosono became a very successful musician in the 1980s technoband YMO. An orchestrator of the group's electronic keyboard, Kae Matsumoto, also came from a family of survivor types, bringing together lineages from the Titanic and Hiroshima. Unlike most techno or new wave bands of the 1980s (famous for the “one-hit wonder” syndrome), YMO's popularity grew slowly and steadily, remaining very successful a hundred years after Masabumi Hosono had left the dock at Southampton.