Chino, Japan, Aug. 24, 2020—August 22nd marked the 76th memorial of the torpedo-sinking by an American submarine of the Tsushima-maru, a merchant ship carrying nearly 1,788 mostly civilian passengers including school children. Survivors and bereaved of nearly 1,500 victims of the sinking of the ship have been observing the memorial annually but what differentiated this year’s anniversary was an unusually extensive reporting of the incident by the Japanese media and stories told by the survivors, some of them probably for the first time.
The ship was en route to Kagoshima from Okinawa on the Aug. 22, 1944 night, when it was torpedoed by the USS Borfin, and sank after 10 minutes, according to the Tsushima-maru memorial museum. The incident was not reported in Japan because of the gag order to the survivors and related parties by the then-imperial government. The gag order survived as a sort of ‘voluntary restraint agreement’ for a long time even after the war ended in 1945. So it was a little surprise that the incident had been underreported for much of the post-war period.
Over the past few years, though, the incident has been drawing media interest and in 2020, key Japanese media entities carried features. NHK, the national broadcasting station, broadcast a special in which some survivors were interviewed. The national daily Asahi reported about the incident too in a feature article, quoting 86-year-old Kiyoshi Uehara as saying that he was ordered by police ‘never, to anybody, about Tsushima.
A succession of articles that the media carry over the past few years seems to be drawing the interest of Japanese young generations who for long have been viewed by older ones as apolitical and essentially pro-American.
‘If the (U.S.) ambassador (to Japan) offers flowers (to the Tsushima-maru vicitims…,’ an anonymous person posted a comment on the Yahoo Japan website. ‘Annihilate, including women and children… That’s the American way,’ wrote another.
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