- 15 Mar 2002
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As I was walking out of a cemetery recently, I was doing my usual glancing around looking for interesting or unusual tombs and happened to notice this small and seemingly unremarkable stone along the edge of the path. The first thing that caught my eye was the kanji ﾅ津 at the top, which roughly translates as "the former" or "the late" and is always followed by the name of the deceased. This goes against the normal style of having on the front of the stone either the family name or the postmortem Buddhist name of the deceased and indicates that there is something about this person that they want to be recognized easily by their real name. In most cases, this is the style used on tombs of soldiers and sailors, giving their service branch, rank, and name on the front of the stone.
In this case, though, ﾅ津 is followed by the guy's name, Unpei Kuwano. To the left of his name we see the date of death, October 4th, 1918. To the right, I could see that he was some sort of victim of something having to do with 窶｢ﾂｽ窶禿ｬﾅ?ﾃ (Hirano-Maru). Japanese ships have traditionally had "maru" as a suffix to their names, and apparently whatever it was that happened to the Hirano-Maru was a big enough deal that it was worth putting on his stone and that it was assumed people would instantly be able to make the connection. Back in 1918 and for several years afterward, I'm sure they could. Me? I had to come home and hit Google.
Hirano-Maru was a Japanese merchant ship operating in the Japan-Europe trade, having been built in 1908. She had the extreme misfortune to catch a torpedo from German U-Boat UB-91 south of Ireland during the closing days of World War I. She sank rapidly. Some say five minutes, some say seven. The seas were high and no lifeboats could be gotten away, all being smashed against the sides of the ship. There are varying reports of the number of people lost, but it seems that about 290 of the 320 people aboard perished. Probably more could have been saved, but initial rescue efforts by the escorting USS Sterrett had to be temporarily halted so the escort could go chase away the sub, which was attempting to torpedo it during rescue operations. There is no way of knowing the number of survivors desperately clinging to floating bits of wreckage who succumbed to the chill waters of the North Atlantic while the rescue ship was off chasing away the U-boat. Bodies washed ashore in Wales quite some time afterwards.
About fifteen Japanese merchant ships were sunk by U-boat activity during World War I. Hirano-Maru was not the largest of these, but her sinking did involve the greatest loss of life, with the others suffering very minor losses by comparison.
Interestingly, there is far more information available online about the sinking of the ship in English than there is in Japanese.
Could someone please verify for me that the first kanji in the family name is a variant of ﾅ狸? I tried looking it up in JWPce with no luck. First time the poor guy has been noticed in almost a century, probably, and I'd hate to be getting his name wrong
