Quick decisions, enduring pain
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The Feb. 9 collision of the USS Greeneville and the Ehime Maru left nine Japanese boys and men dead, tarnished U.S. military careers and created tension between the United States and Japan. Advertiser staff writers Tanya Bricking in Uwajima, Japan, and Dan Nakaso at Pearl Harbor's court of inquiry, through interviews, naval court testimony, investigators' transcripts and other documents, detail what went wrong that day and how it changed lives forever in a Japanese harbor town.
By Dan Nakaso and Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writers
Captains guiding their warships toward the entrance to Pearl Harbor call it "Papa Hotel Time."
It's when they're supposed to reach a spot in the ocean three miles south of Pearl Harbor. If they don't, if they blow their Papa Hotel Time, the schedules of everyone waiting for them are thrown off — from the tugboat captains to the line handlers back at the pier.
Papa Hotel is basically a loose reference to Pearl Harbor, although none of the sailors call their home port Papa Hotel.
But in a Navy that prides itself on running on precision, they all know the importance of hitting Papa Hotel Time.
It's also one more subtle way of measuring the professionalism and proficiency of a captain and crew. Hitting every mark and meeting expectations is important aboard a boat like the USS Greeneville, considered one of the best submarines in the Pacific Fleet.
On Feb. 9, Papa Hotel Time lingered in the background of the events that were about to unfold aboard the Greeneville.
About midway through a planned seven-hour cruise, the officers realized they were running 45 minutes late.
There was no way they were going to make their 2 p.m. Papa Hotel Time.
THE STORY FROM UWAJIMA
A father who expected a lot
Katsuya Nomoto left for Hawai'i aboard the Ehime Maru knowing his trip was supposed to make him a man.
His father, Mitsunori, a fisherman like his father before him, looked at it as a turning point for his 17-year-old son. The father was sending a schoolboy to sea, and when Katsuya came back, he would follow in the footsteps of generations of Nomoto men.
"He was the only son out of three brothers who wanted to take over the family business," said Fumi Yokoyama, who is 15 years older and saw the pressure building on her young cousin. "His father was expecting a lot."
The trip was one last hurrah for Katsuya and his friends from Uwajima Fisheries High School.
In the southwestern Japanese countryside, Uwajima is the last train stop on an island best known as the center of Shingon Buddhism. The town of 65,000 people is structured around a 400-year-old castle, but it is dominated by the sea, where fathers like Mitsunori Nomoto cultivate pearls and seaweed and go home to snack on dried strips of squid and pickles to complement their beer.
Parents seeking the highest education for their children have begun to abandon Japan's fishery schools, which have dwindled over the years. But in Uwajima, fishing is more than a trade. It is part of the fabric of life.
Uwajima Fisheries High School sends young men to sea three times a year. Those on the Ehime Maru trip included 13 students, half of the school's second-year ocean engineering class, who left Japan on Jan. 10 to do research and practice fishing techniques.
"It's like a part-of-life step," Uwajima Mayor Hirohisa Ishibashi said. "Once you take this training, you become more mature."
Katsuya's good friend and cousin, Chyouichiro Yokoyama, also was on board, and the two of them were eager to learn about handling a ship much larger than the boats they easily maneuvered around their hometown harbor.
Once they reached Honolulu, they visited Pearl Harbor and shopped in Waikiki for souvenirs, like the T-shirt Katsuya bought for his girlfriend.
Katsuya knew what was in store for him upon his return to Uwajima, where he lived near the bay in a cramped house next to aunts, uncles and cousins. Katsuya would become one of the men Uwajima families would turn to for fresh fish for sashimi or "satsuma-jiru," the local favorite of minced fish and miso on rice.
Tradition had always made roles clear in Uwajima. Katsuya was planning to accept his position as a newcomer in the family fishing business hierarchy.
The Nomotos knew the dangers of the sea, but none of them had ever been in a major accident.
They expected this trip would be no different.
ABOARD THE GREENEVILLE
An experience of a lifetime
Five-thirty in the morning is an unkind hour to rise while you're on vacation. Especially a Hawaiian vacation.
Some of the people waiting for the Navy van to pick them up at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel were still filled with anticipation about their trip aboard the Greeneville.
John Hall, of Sealy, Texas, had been waiting for this day for a year. He had just stepped down as CEO of a Dallas-based oil and gas exploration company because of his health. He hoped his trip aboard the Greeneville would be the experience of a lifetime.
Hall is what the Navy calls a "distinguished visitor."
The idea is to give politically connected or influential movers and shakers a sea voyage. Then the Navy hopes the guests go back home bragging about the military.
Navy regulations say that distinguished visitors can ride only on ships already scheduled to get under way. But on Feb. 9, the crew of the Greeneville prepared for a seven-hour cruise for the sole purpose of showing the 16 civilians what their boat can do.
To this day, Navy officials still haven't clearly explained how it happened.
The guests walked onto the Greeneville's gangplank sometime around 7:30 a.m. and shook hands with the submarine's gregarious captain, Cmdr. Scott Waddle.
Waddle, 41, has the build of a fullback. Michael "Mickey" Nolan of Hawai'i Kai, another civilian guest, saw Waddle and thought: He "has admiral written all over him."
The visitors met Lt. Cmdr. Gerald Pfeifer, the Greeneville's 38-year-old executive officer. Tall and lanky, Pfeifer constantly had to duck his red head while maneuvering around the boat's tight quarters.
And they were introduced to their escort for the day, Capt. Robert Brandhuber, the chief of staff for the Pacific Fleet's submarine force.
The names of other senior sailors and officers were written on a list of people scheduled to stand watch. The lists are known as "watch bills," and the Navy takes them very seriously. But for all kinds of reasons, nine of the 13 people listed on the Greeneville's watch bill eventually found themselves in places they weren't supposed to be.
At 7:59 a.m., the Greeneville pushed away from its moorings and headed for open water.
Mickey Nolan and his wife, Susan, strapped themselves into life vests and stood on the deck of the Greeneville as the USS Missouri and the Arizona Memorial faded from view.
The Nolans found that leaning against the conning tower that protruded from the top of the Greeneville's hull gave them better stability.
On shore, Waddle's wife, Jill, waved to her husband. He waved back. Waddle told his visitors that it was the perfect time to make a cell phone call.
Mickey talked to his mother in New York. Susan called her father.
"Guess where I am?" some of the visitors asked.
Sailors then slid them into safety harnesses for their climb into the conning tower, where Waddle and Hall were smoking cigars.
Waddle talked about his Navy career and his family. "I almost felt like I learned his whole life story, which was remarkable," Mickey Nolan said.
Someone below suggested that the ship needed to make preparations to dive, but Waddle would have none of it.
"Well, I'm not finished with my story yet," he said.
When everyone finally got below, Brandhuber wondered if all of the things he had heard about the Greeneville were true.
His boss, the submarine force's commander, had told Brandhuber that the Greeneville might have the best sonar crew in Hawai'i.
The Greeneville certainly made a good first impression.
"It was one of the most meticulously maintained submarines I have ever seen," Brandhuber said. "The Greeneville was better maintained than my submarine was."
THE STORY FROM UWAJIMA
Making plans for a birthday
When Feb. 9 rolled around, Takeshi Mizuguchi was still riding high on the excitement of his 17th birthday two days earlier.
He called his family in Uwajima the day before to tell them about Hawai'i and see how they had spent his birthday without him.
"I asked whether they had a birthday party on the ship," said Tatsuyoshi Mizuguchi, his father.
Takeshi said no, they hadn't really done anything special.
"Well," his father said, "we'll go out to dinner and celebrate your birthday when you get back."
Takeshi, captain of the school's table-tennis club, was looking forward to relaxing at home.
"We feel like we are doing hard physical exercise every day while we are practicing tuna longline fishing," he wrote in a newsletter faxed to Uwajima Fisheries High School from the ship in early February.
The training program was the school's biggest selling point. With four fisheries schools in the region, competition for students was stiff. The training program promised a semester at sea and a stop in Ho-nolulu.
"Hawai'i has the safest ocean and mild climate," High School Principal Ietaka Horita said. For parents and students, the field trip was an easy sell.
But being stuck in four-bunk cabins with other classmates on the 35-member Ehime Maru could wear on the nerves.
Teacher Jun Nakata and student Yusuke Terata were among those who became seasick. In the newsletter home, student Toshiya Sakashima told everyone Nakata was so sick he wanted to go home. Terata, captain of the fencing club, wrote that he was excited to hear the club was going to enter a tournament but sad that he couldn't be a part of it.
Back home in Japan, Tatsuyoshi Mizuguchi thought of his son as lucky. Mizuguchi had honeymooned in Hawai'i and attended a festival 20 years ago that made him fall in love with the place.
He hoped Hawai'i would create happy memories for his son as well.
ABOARD THE GREENEVILLE
First contact with Sierra 13
The Analog Video Signal Display Unit sits in front of the Greeneville's two periscopes. It's little more than a television monitor, but it relays critical sonar information to the officer of the deck and the commanding officer.
A properly working monitor means the officer of the deck doesn't have to check as often with the sailors responsible for tracking other ships in the water. He more or less sees what they see.
Sometime between 9:30 and 10 a.m. somebody noticed that the unit wasn't working.
A broken Analog Video Signal Display Unit doesn't hit the threshold of what the Navy calls a "safety of ship" issue. It just means that everybody needs to be more careful about double-checking the information they have on surface contacts and letting the officer of the deck know what they've found.
Over the next four hours, neither happened.
On the periscope stand, Lt. j.g. Michael Coen took over as officer of the deck from Lt. Keith Sloan, a veteran officer with piercing eyes and a deep voice.
Coen, 26, was known as a thorough and meticulous young officer, the kind of guy you don't necessarily want in place when a job needs to get done in a hurry.
When Coen assumed the watch at 11:45, Sloan didn't bother to tell him that the hazy conditions he saw through the ship's No. 2 periscope were unusually bad for Hawai'i.
In fact, they may have been the worst Sloan had ever seen.
In the sonar room, a trainee named Stuart Ray Rhodes was manning a station without proper supervision, a violation of Navy regulations. For at least 3 1/2 years, unsupervised trainees had been common practice aboard the Greeneville.
The workload wasn't too heavy when the sonar operators discovered two new contacts, and gave each of them "S" designations marking them as sonar contacts.
The new ships were called Sierra 12 and Sierra 13.
Sierra 13 disappeared for a while. Sonar supervisor Edward McGiboney thought it probably got lost when the Greeneville's sonar equipment in the ship's nose was pointed in the wrong direction.
Eventually Sierra 13 returned.
It wasn't until much later that McGiboney and the rest of the crew learned the real name of Sierra 13.
The Ehime Maru.
The sonar room technicians violated another standard submarine practice by removing a tape intended to constantly record sonar contacts. They wanted to let the visitors listen to whale songs they had recorded.
Todd Thoman, a civilian visitor who had worked with Hall at the Dallas oil company, put on overalls and climbed into a torpedo tube to write his name inside. Some of the visitors pulled levers that fired water slugs as if they were torpedoes.
At 560 feet below the surface, Catherine Graham Wyatt of Golden, Colo. even steered the Greeneville. The crewman standing over her told her to turn the sub left and helped Wyatt crank the wheel completely over, until the Greeneville had made a 360-degree turn.
Mickey Nolan soaked it all up. He felt like a sponge drinking in every bit of a new experience.
Susan Nolan had worried she would feel claustrophobic. Instead, she was surprised at how comfortable she felt, even if the boat seemed chilly at times.
Life aboard a 360-foot, Los Angeles-class submarine can be hard and filled with stress. Just to get into the submarine force, sailors have to pass demanding psychological tests.
Yet Waddle found a formula that kept morale high.
The Greeneville retained 65 percent of its first-time sailors — about double the Navy average. One sailor even told Mickey Nolan that he came back to the submarine corps specifically to serve under Waddle.
Over a three-course lunch, Waddle bragged about his crew. Except he didn't call them his crew. They were "shipmates."
He talked about the young men whose lives were transformed by the Navy. He said he believed in surrounding himself with good people. And when the guests raved about the fish they had eaten, Waddle summoned the chef to show him off, too.
All of the talk at lunch pushed the Greeneville further behind schedule. Even with one-third of the Greeneville's crew left behind at Pearl Harbor — 51 enlisted men and six officers — there wasn't enough room in the mess to seat all 16 visitors at once. So they ate in two shifts.
Pfeifer, the Greeneville's executive officer, was looking more and more anxious. Anthony Schnur of The Woodlands, Texas, one of the guests waiting to eat, thought Pfeifer must be hungry.
Actually, Pfeifer was trying to nudge his captain to get lunch finished so the high-speed maneuvers could begin.
As the crew battened down the plates and cups, Sloan — the Greeneville's navigator — interrupted a conversation between Pfeifer and one of the civilians.
It was 1 p.m., Sloan said. The Greeneville was only an hour away from Papa Hotel Time.
"We need to get going," Pfeifer told Waddle.
THE STORY FROM UWAJIMA
The last stage of a life at sea
The seaside landscape in Uwa-jima has been marred by industry and metal-framed buildings, but there is symmetry in its mandarin orange fields and terraced mountainsides.
There are two types of people in this village: those who feel at home in the town and those who feel at home on the sea.
Shuji Yanagihara said that was the difference between the "land people" and the "ocean people."
Sea people feel comfortable enough to stay the course with the ship without finding it boring, said Yanagihara, an Ehime Maru crewman.
Sometimes, when all they could see from the bridge of the ship was miles of water, he and the others would talk about what they would do when they reached port.
Hirotaka Segawa, 60, the ship's radio communications officer, talked about retiring when he got back to Japan. This was to be his last trip.
On Feb. 8, he had sent postcards to his mother and his brother, telling them, "I am filled with deep emotion reaching the last stage of my life at sea for 40 years and then some."
Friends guessed he'd try to develop a love of the land through golf.
"Every now and then, Mr. Segawa came up to the bridge to talk about the weather," Yanagihara said. "And he would say, 'So, you want to golf in Hawai'i?' "
The sea had always been what drew Segawa and his fellow crewman right back out, with little homesickness for those they left behind.
"Ocean people, they're really tight," Yanagihara said. "It's almost family. The world is different."
ABOARD THE GREENEVILLE
High-speed turns, computer junk
Petty Officer Patrick Seacrest tracks ships in case the Greeneville needs to fire at a hostile target. In peacetime, he serves as one more set of eyes and ears looking and listening for ships.
Seacrest, known as the fire control technician of the watch, adjusted his controls at 1:15 p.m. He worried about a new contact, Sierra 14, that he knew little about.
Seacrest was convinced that Sierra 13 — the Ehime Maru — and Sierra 12 were somewhere around 15,000 yards away and posed no collision danger to the Greeneville.
His computers knew better.
If Seacrest had thought that Sierra 13 was closer, he might have hit the "enter system" button on his control panel. The computer would have given him precise information for each of the three contacts he held.
But he was focused on Sierra 14 and unaware that Sierra 13 had closed to within 4,000 yards.
Aboard the Greeneville, any ship that comes within 4,000 yards crosses an imaginary "trip wire." And Seacrest was required to notify the officer of the deck of any ship that crosses the trip wire.
Instead, intent on getting more data on Sierra 14, Seacrest said nothing.
The rest of the crew was preparing for "angles and dangles," a dramatic series of dips and dives designed to evade torpedoes.
For the next 10 minutes, the ship's depth varied from 200 to 650 feet. It would go up 15 degrees, then down 30 degrees and back up again.
It was clear to everyone in the control room that Waddle was telling Coen what angles to order. What wasn't clear was whether Waddle had taken over.
The question of who was running the control room may have caused some of Waddle's crew to ignore their own concerns.
While they might have spoken up to a new officer of the deck, they said little to Waddle, who clearly had proven that he knew what he was doing.
Waddle then directed Coen through a series of high-speed turns. The ship sped to more than 20 knots and for the next six minutes whipped through a series of 30-degree turns.
The visitors were stunned by the agility of the 6,900-ton submarine. Brandhuber was impressed by the crew.
High-speed runs come at a cost. With all of the noise the ship generated, Seacrest was losing his hold on Sierra 12, 13 and 14. He still said nothing. Seacrest was convinced none of them had crossed the imaginary trip wire of 4,000 yards.
In the sonar room, McGiboney also believed his sonar contacts were far away. He just couldn't be sure.
During the high-speed runs, McGiboney's computer readings were so jumbled that the readings looked like "spaghetti."
No one's exactly sure who gave the next order, "Prepare to go to periscope depth." But it was clear who was in charge.
Ever since "angles and dangles" began, Waddle had been directing Coen how to drive the Greeneville.
And now he added something new.
Waddle told Coen he wanted the Greeneville to go from 150 feet to periscope depth in just five minutes.
Before going to periscope depth, Waddle's Standing Order 6 says the officer of the deck must conduct two "Target Motion Analysis" legs to track contacts.
Good "TMA" requires driving the sub in two different directions for at least three to five minutes each way to get range, speed and bearing on sonar contacts. So thorough target motion analysis takes up 10 minutes before rising to periscope depth.
Coen had the Greeneville up at 60 feet in six minutes.
It meant cutting out his usual control room briefing around the periscope stand to let everyone know what to expect.
And it meant that Ernest Streyle, the weapons department chief, didn't get a chance to report on the condition of the seas above.
"There was no time," Streyle said.
Once the Greeneville reached 60 feet, Lt. Sloan and the visitors watched Coen swing the periscope around as they glanced at the television monitors to see what Coen saw.
Sloan saw water breaking over the periscope's lens. To Seacrest, watching from the starboard side of the control room, "I just saw the picture moving around."
Over the 4 to 6 foot swells smashing over the lens, Seacrest could also tell that the skies were cloudy.
At 1:37 p.m. and 48 seconds, Coen was still on the periscope looking for anything on the surface.
Sierra 13 was closing.
THE STORY FROM UWAJIMA
'Ittekimasu! I'm leaving!'
Hiroshi Nishida never liked to drive cars.
The 49-year-old ship mechanic and engineer was much more comfortable out at sea or relaxing in the hot springs of his homeland.
The last time he came home from a three-month tour at sea, it took less than a day for him to want to return to the water. He had his wife drive him to his mother's house, and he set out on his small boat to catch squid. He came home with a catch of 400, enough for his wife, Chihoko, to have to think of inventive ways to prepare them for meals.
She shared in the pride of the catch and took it in stride as the wife of a fisherman.
"His joy is fishing," she said. "He does so much fishing that you cannot eat fish from the supermarket."
Part of making their marriage work was falling into a routine. She knew he would be gone three times a year for spans of about 75 days each. Sometimes he would call home and ask whether their sixth-grade son's team won their soccer game and how many points his boy had scored.
Hiroshi's own father died when he was 20, but he assumed his family life would be different. So did Chihoko. Part of their ritual was the way they would part when he left the house on long trips.
She would tell him to be careful, and Hiroshi would say, "Ittekimasu!" Japanese for "I'm leaving!"
Like a screenplay, the words came out on cue three times a year for 13 years, each time Hiroshi left for fishing training trips with a ship full of students from Uwajima Fisheries High School.
Chihoko would wait for her husband's return, knowing what he would say when he walked in the door: "Tadaima!" — "I'm home!"
Chihoko still longs for the words.
"When you hear the 'ittekimasu,' you always believe the 'tadaima' comes with it," she said. "Everybody thinks they will come back and say, 'I'm home!' "
ABOARD THE GREENEVILLE
The periscope search for ships
Catherine Wyatt's husband, Ken, was struck by how quiet the control room had gotten.
"It was very much like a church," he said.
Sloan and the rest of the crew were waiting to hear one of two things come out of Coen's mouth: "No close contacts," meaning the surface was relatively clear; or the order for "emergency deep" because something on the surface was close enough to cause a collision.
When Coen said "no close contacts," McGiboney in the sonar shack assumed he had been right all along. Sierra 12 and 13 must be far away, as he suspected.
Seacrest felt the same way.
"Because (Coen) didn't see them visually," he said, "I thought all the contacts were distant."
Coen then adjusted the periscope to conduct a standard aerial search for airplanes and helicopters.
Waddle interrupted and took the periscope, directing Coen to bring the Greeneville 2 feet higher. Waddle spent most of his time pointing the periscope toward the back of the Greeneville, where the sonar contacts had come from.
Waddle's time on the periscope lasted only 80 seconds — another violation of his own standing orders.
"We're moving around rather quickly for no apparent reason," Brandhuber thought. But the chief of staff for the Pacific Fleet's submarine force said nothing.
In the radio room, Petty Officer David Carter was manipulating his electronic surveillance measure equipment, listening for a signal that would indicate a close surface ship.
Carter passed his headphones to a trainee named Jason Bruner and let Bruner announce to the control room: "Hold no close contacts."
Carter then tried to get a good read on one particular contact, but never got the chance.
Waddle suddenly flipped up the periscope's handles and ordered "emergency deep!"
"We never did finish analyzing anything," Carter said.
Waddle's command at 1:40 p.m. startled Lt. Sloan. He thought Waddle told him earlier there would be no emergency deep maneuver.
"It jumped out at me for a split second," Sloan said.
The Greeneville began dropping to 400 feet as Waddle directed Coen to turn the ship left to 340 degrees, "essentially back to Papa Hotel," Sloan said.
Waddle asked two of his visitors to help launch the Greeneville into its emergency blow, which would send the submarine rocketing on an irreversible trip to the surface.
Civilian guest Deanda Thoman did as she was told. With the help of a sailor, Thoman grabbed the Greeneville's klaxon switch that makes an "ahh-OOH-gah" sound when flipped. She turned the diving alarm three times.
Jack Hall eagerly put his hands on the round, flat, steel-gray emergency main ballast tank actuators and got ready to blow air into the main tank.
Mickey Nolan watched as Hall pulled, then pushed the knobs just as he had been told. Nolan could hear Hall measuring the amount of air by counting out loud.
"One, 1,000. Two, 1,000. Three, 1,000."
As the Greeneville rose, Petty Officer McGiboney kept waiting for the bow to break the surface of the water.
"It didn't make sense," he thought.
"Not long after that, I heard the first boom."
The time was 1:43 p.m. and 15 seconds.
Papa Hotel Time suddenly didn't matter anymore.
THE STORY FROM UWAJIMA
'Everybody abandon ship!'
Daisuke Shinoto was resting in his cabin on the Ehime Maru after lunch with a friend when he felt something that reminded him of an earthquake.
In his homeland island of Shikoku along the Pacific Ring of Fire where earthquakes are frequent, rumbles and rattles are familiar sounds. But the loud bang the 16-year-old heard that day came as a shock.
The Ehime Maru had left port in Honolulu about noon that day. It was cloudy and a little choppy, and Shinoto and his classmates had finished coiling mooring ropes and took turns eating lunch as the ship headed toward a fishing ground where they were going to practice fishing exercises.
But the dishes began spilling out of the cabinets in the mess hall and books fell from their shelves. Even before the second jolt came, the ship began to lurch and the electricity shut off.
In the dark, Shinoto grabbed his life jacket from his room and started running as water sloshed at his feet and quickly rose to his knees.
He rushed to the back of the ship to stairs and fled to the emergency area on the deck, where about 20 people were scrambling and Captain Hisao Onishi was shouting, "Put out the life raft! Everyone abandon ship!"
There, Shinoto saw two people for the last time: student Yusuke Terata, the captain of the fencing club who stood on the bridge of the ship petrified with fear, and crewman Hirotaka Segawa, the communication officer who had tried to make an SOS call before the ship sank but couldn't get the instrument board to work.
Shinoto never got a last glimpse of crewmen Hiroshi Nishida and Toshimichi Furuya, who were on duty in the engine room; or teachers Hiroshi Makizawa and Jun Nakata, who had been resting; or Takeshi Mizuguchi, his friend who had just had a birthday; or Katsuya Nomoto, who had earned the nickname "Junior" while on the ship; or Toshiya Sakashima, one of his best friends.
Everything was happening too quickly.
Shinoto let go of the railing, jumped in the water and swam toward a life raft. He lost his glasses as he swam through diesel fuel.
And he looked down to see the Ehime Maru sinking.
"I just thought, 'It's sinking so fast,' " he said. "It's so fast."
Shinoto slipped on oil trying to pull himself onto a life raft. Someone's arms pulled him up. He had swallowed lots of water. Students around him were vomiting from swallowing fuel. All Shinoto wanted to do was rest.
It wasn't until later that he realized Sakashima, one of his close friends, the funny kid who liked trucks, was missing. So was Nakata, one of his favorite teachers.
Shinoto, who had lived in an orphanage since he was 6, felt abandoned.
"It's like a nightmare. I can't believe it," he said weeks after the accident. "Sometimes I dream about it. When I run away to the deck."
His best friend, Shoji Tsuji, survived the wreck as well. They spotted each other in separate life rafts moments after the crash. They don't talk about it.
All of the boys who survived are like that, said Toshio Kamado, father of Atsushi Kamado, another survivor. They are not the men their parents expected to return.
"If they stay alone, they just think about it," Toshio Kamado said. "They can't sleep. They leave the lights on. They're afraid of being alone."
ABOARD THE GREENEVILLE
'What the hell was that?'
Everyone agrees the first sound was a bang. The next sound inside the Greeneville's control room was either another bang or just a shudder that seemed to go through the length of the ship.
Two crewmen yanked Hall out of his seat and took over the controls.
Ken Wyatt stared at Waddle, whose eyes were getting bigger. Susan Schnur, another guest from Texas, thought Waddle was turning white.
"What the hell was that?" Waddle asked to no one in particular.
A crewman answered anyway. "I don't know, sir."
Waddle looked through the periscope. The visitors and crew could see the Ehime Maru in the monitors. To some of the civilians, the 174-foot Ehime Maru looked like a tiny fishing boat because it was already slipping below the waves.
"Someone escort our guests into the mess area," Waddle said.
In the mess area and later in the torpedo room, some of the women were getting seasick and mild panic was setting in.
Susan Nolan thought the Greeneville might be leaking radioactive fuel.
Catherine Graham Wyatt hoped she and the 15 other civilians somehow weren't responsible.
"Were we a distraction?" she later asked investigators. "It's weighing on my conscience."
THE STORY FROM UWAJIMA
Packing his son's suitcase
The family business has been lagging since Mitsunori Nomoto heard his son's ship went down. He rushed to Hawai'i, armed with luggage for himself and a big bag of clothes for Katsuya.
He wanted to believe that his son would need more clothes, because he wanted to believe his son would be found alive.
Instead, Nomoto arrived in Honolulu for a bittersweet reunion with his nephew, who was rescued from the Ehime Maru. Nomoto went back home without ever needing the clothes he had packed for his boy who dreamed of taking over the family business.
The burden has been too much for Nomoto. His back-and-forth trips to Hawai'i have left him exhausted.
He caught a fever he hasn't been able to shake.
Two weeks ago, he was admitted to the hospital in Uwajima, where he has been ever since.
"I feel like I'm still in a dream world," said Nomoto's niece, Fumi Yokoyama, who lives in one of the family cottages along Uwajima Bay. "I see the TV, but it doesn't seem real. I see all the family names, and it seems strange."
Chyouichiro Yokoyama, who survived the shipwreck, has not returned to the Uwajima shipyard.
"He's very upset, really down," Fumi Yokoyama said. "He's just staying home all the time."
Katsuya's mother shuffles from the neighboring cottage to the hospital to visit her husband. She cries at night in an empty house, her niece said, just like other family members longing for loved ones to walk in and say, "Tadaima!"
