New Light Shed On Titanic Survivor

TOKYO - The Titanic was sinking fast. Horrified passengers rushed onto lifeboats being lowered into the dark, icy sea. Desperate men were stopped at gunpoint so women and children could escape first.

Masabumi Hosono stood on the deck, torn between the fear of shame and the instinct for survival.

Then the 42-year-old Japanese bureaucrat found himself in the right place at the right moment. There were two spots open in a lifeboat. Hosono hesitated, but when he saw a man next to him jump in, he swallowed his fear and followed.

Hosono's decision saved his life - yet it brought him decades of shame in Japan. He was branded a coward, fired from his job and spent the rest of his days embittered.

The reputation of the only Japanese aboard the Titanic may find some salvation, however, with the recent discovery of his handwritten account of the 1912 disaster, an American researcher says.

The letter written by Hosono to his wife in the days after the tragedy reveals that he was urged into the lifeboat by a ship's officer, and that he helped save the lives of fellow survivors by helping row the craft away from the pull of the sinking Titanic.

Also, it refutes Japanese accounts of the time that had identified Hosono as an Asian man aboard a different lifeboat, No. 13, who was said to have acted ignobly in his rush to escape. Hosono, it turned out, had been on lifeboat No. 10.

"It's a very sad thing that it took us 85 years to be able to put this piece together," said Matt Taylor, who is organizing a Titanic exhibition in Japan.

On April 15, 1912, the "unsinkable" Titanic ran into an iceberg and sank off the coast of Nova Scotia. The disaster claimed more than 1,500 lives. Hosono was among only 700 or so people to live.

Like many men who survived, he returned home to meet a stream of press accounts of the bravery of those who died and the cowardice of those who lived.

The pressure was especially harsh in Japan, where tradition prized a noble death over survival and a man could rectify shameful behavior with ritual suicide.

News reports were particularly critical of the man aboard lifeboat No. 13. After newspapers named Hosono as that man, he was ostracized.

He lost his job in 1914 and spent the next nine years working part time in the ministry. Until his death in 1939, mention of the Titanic was forbidden in his home.

Hosono's letter shows, however, that he escaped on lifeboat No. 10, Taylor said. "This fact alone restores his honor and credibility," he said.

Taylor discovered the letter last summer while researching Japanese links to the tragedy for Exhibition Titanic Japan, a show to open in July. He found the letter in Hosono's belongings and persuaded the family to allow its public release.

The tragedy continues to fascinate. A Broadway musical about the sinking won five 1997 Tony Awards this year, and director James Cameron's $200 million epic film "Titanic" - the most expensive movie ever - just opened in American and Japanese theaters.

Hosono's account, written on Titanic stationery as he steamed toward New York on the ocean liner Carpathia, is considered to be among the most expressive and detailed renderings of the panic aboard the ill-fated ship.

"All the emotions of what he has witnessed . . . just culminated in this letter to his wife," said Michael Findlay, co-founder of the Titanic International Society in New Jersey. "I've read hundreds of survivor accounts, and nothing has hit me as much as the story of Mr. Hosono."

He writes of the wordless panic on the deck as women and children were rushed silently onto lifeboats - and of the later screams of those who went down with the great oceanliner.