In the early hours of April 15, 1912, the RMS Titanic, a marvel of modern engineering, met with catastrophe in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Among its passengers was Masabumi Hosono, a Japanese civil servant, whose survival would become a source of national controversy and personal disgrace.
Born in 1870, Hosono was an employee of the Japanese Ministry of Transport. In 1910, he was sent to Russia to study the country’s railway system, and it was on his return journey to Japan that he boarded the Titanic at Southampton as a second-class passenger.
