Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/08/the-japanese-passenger-who-survived-the-titanic-but-faced-unbearable-shaming-at-home.html
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There was so much the Titanic got wrong but, yeah, blame the passenger who tried to survive it. The lifeboats weren’t filled to capacity so it’s not likely he bumped any of the more vulnerable passengers. I guess culture, worse: appropriated culture, trumps better thinking and more practical values. Maybe his family appreciated the return of their father and breadwinner?
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Well, that’s interesting. Is there a particular reason it was so successful? Was it just an unusually good book? Did it have a lot of competition? Is it still well-known in Japan today? (Is Mr. Smiles the subject of preposterous anime caricatures?)
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The popularity of Self Help in Japan after the Meiji Restoration and opening of Japan to the West is pretty fascinating. The book is fundamentally about “rugged individualism”, which of course doesn’t at all go with the popular conception of the Japanese as being group-orientated and consensus-driven. You’d have expected the book to have gone down like a lead balloon in Japan, but it didn’t.
Having spent several years in Japan myself (and having written my degree dissertation on the subject of this conundrum), I think there always has been a type of individualism there (particularly outside of the cities) that isn’t recognised in the West. You’ll not be surprised to learn that the origin of the Japanese hive-mind, “non-individualist” has some of its roots in allied propaganda and psyops leading up to and during WWII, but also as a political mechanism of social control at various times from the Meiji period (and the lead up to pre-war fascism at that time) and beyond. There is even a pretty ideological branch of cod sociology for it called “ninhonjinron”.
I suspect the reality is that Japanese society is, under the hood as it were, much more similar to the West than many would like to admit.
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and the only survivor to experience public shaming.
Sadly not - the warped Edwardian morals of the time also destroyed J Bruce Ismay, chair of the White Star Line. Ismay who had overseen the building of the Olympic class liners survived the sinking and was publicly smeared by the great and the good on both sides of The Atlantic, not least by William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers.
After helping people to the lifeboats, Ismay left the ship on one of the last lifeboats just a short while before it finally sank. Witnesses said there were no more women and children in that part of the ship and the boat was already being lowered. Despite that, Ismay was publicly humiliated as ‘J Brute Ismay’. As his granddaughter wrote:
Having had the misfortune (one might say the misjudgement) to survive – a fact he recognised despairingly within hours – he withdrew into a silence in which his wife made herself complicit – imposing it on the family circle and thus ensuring that the subject of the Titanic was as effectively frozen as the bodies recovered from the sea.
He was utterly devastated by the disaster with multiple witnesses talking about his distress and inconsolable grief. Even after being cleared of any wrongdoing in both Inquiries, he continued to be slandered right up to the modern era - Cameron’s Titanic continued to tell falsehoods about a flawed man who did what most people would have done when faced with catastrophe.There is no evidence that he ordered Titanic’s speed to be increased; there’s none that he dressed as a woman to leave the ship (a myth that keeps reappearing with different male survivors),
Mike Brady over at Oceanliner Designs (great channel BTW) has a good piece about Ismay.
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Including Masabumi Hosono.
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