On Sept. 26, 1954, the passenger ferry Toya Maru, 7-year-old pride of the Japanese Railways-owned fleet plying the cold blue waters of the Tsugaru Straits between Hokkaido and northern Honshu, sank in a typhoon with the loss of more than 1,200 lives. Barely 150 passengers and crew survived.
To this day, the 1912 disaster in which the iconic White Star liner Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic with the loss of some 1,500 lives defines the scale of civilian tragedies at sea. However, the loss of the Toya Maru (pictured above) — the worst such disaster in Japanese history — comes tragically close to that.
Compared to the Titanic, though, the Toya Maru tragedy is a historical footnote that is unknown to most young Japanese.