(Dan Tri) – Masabumi Hosono was criticized all his life for not following the principle of `prioritizing women and children` to avoid the fate of dying on the Titanic.
A scene from the movie Titanic directed by James Cameron, recreating the sinking disaster of the ship of the same name in 1912 (Photo: Paramount Pictures-20th Century Fox).
To this day, the sinking of the Titanic and the anecdotes surrounding it continue to attract people’s attention, even though it may be a sad story like that of Masabumi Hosono.
The last chance taker
Before the Titanic set sail, Hosono was a Japanese official working in Russia as deputy commissioner of the Railway Board of the Japanese Ministry of Transport, Japan Times reported.
When he returned home, Mr. Hosono, 42 years old, decided to board the Titanic in Southampton, England, instead of making the trip across Russia.
What happened next became history: On its first trip, the Titanic crashed into an iceberg on the cold evening of April 14, 1912, leading to fatal consequences.
Masabumi Hosono, survivor of the Titanic disaster (Photo: SCMP).
According to Mr. Hosono’s account – most of which he wrote during his days on the rescue ship, on the evening of the tragedy, he was awakened by a knock on his personal cabin door.
In what seemed like the last moments of his life, Mr. Hosono had a chance to survive when he saw an officer launching a lifeboat and said there were two empty seats left.
`I sank into despair when I thought I wouldn’t be able to see you and my beloved children again, because I had no choice but to suffer the same fate as the Titanic,` Hosono wrote in a letter to his wife the following days.
And Mr. Hosono jumped into the boat, becoming one of 700 survivors of the Titanic disaster.
Mr. Hosono’s notes about the Titanic disaster were published by his family in 1997.
Sympathy comes late
Unlike Ms. Violet Jessop, a stewardess who survived the shipwreck, Mr. Hosono faced a cold attitude when returning to his hometown.
According to Metropolis Japan, Mr. Hosono was criticized for not complying with the principle of `women and children first` and avoiding `honorable death`.
Mr. Hosono lost his job in 1914, AP reported.
The Titanic left England in 1912 (Photo: AP).
According to Brantford Expositor, criticism of Mr. Hosono’s escape from death continued into the 1990s and was pushed further by the negative reaction of the Japanese media after James Cameron’s Titanic.
In 1997, the AP newspaper reported that Mr. Hosono was mistaken for another Asian man on another lifeboat and it was this person who was judged to have behaved cowardly.
The above discovery essentially `restored the honor and reputation` of Mr. Hosono, Matt Taylor – an American researcher who investigated the Japanese man’s notes – told AP.
Written on paper used specifically for the Titanic, Mr. Hosono’s account is to this day considered one of the most detailed records of what happened amid the panic on the ill-fated ship.