Families silently mourn missing sons

By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writer

UWAJIMA, Japan — In Buddhist tradition, on the 49th day after someone dies, the body is burned in a ceremony meant to send the body and soul to its next life.

Family members of students who survived the Ehime Maru crash include, foreground, Takahiro Hosokawa, father of Hiroyuki Hosokawa. Among others are, from left, Iseo Sakamoto and Toshio Kamato, and Kenji Shinoto, second from right, and Michiyo Tsuji Tanimoto Morimasa • Special to The Advertiser

There is a sense in Uwajima that everything is on hold.

The polite thing to do is just be quiet and wait.

School officials at Uwajima Fisheries High School haven't decided whether to send another training vessel full of teen-agers to sea before summer.

Hidenori Doi, a graduate of Uwajima Fisheries High School and a city congressman in this southwestern Japanese city of 65,000, has made a lot of noise gathering thousands of signatures on a petition to raise the Ehime Maru and recover the bodies that may still be inside.

But the Western idea of bringing casseroles to comfort grieving families is foreign to this country harbor town.

Uwajima, built around a 400-year-old castle, is the last outpost on the island of Shikoku, two hours by rapid train from Matsuyama, the island's most cosmopolitan city.

And in Uwajima, unwritten customs rule.

Etiquette demands that victims' families be treated with polite silence.

"We don't have a way to console," Doi said.

Without the bodies of the missing, it is too soon to plan memorials or to prepare a place to pray for them.

"There is no probability they are alive," Doi said. "But there is hope."

Today is the day Uwajima's sons on the fishing vessel were supposed to arrive home.

But the victims' families arrived home to Uwajima from Hawai'i yesterday with no fanfare.

"It's not the end for them," Uwajima Mayor Hirohisa Ishibashi said. "There will be more to come for them."

Survivors 'victims' as well

The Feb. 9 collision of the USS Greeneville submarine that left nine of the region's boys and men lost at sea has stirred emotions that Japanese families try to keep inside.

"The students who are saved are seen as lucky," said Takahiro Hosokawa, whose son, Hiroyuki, escaped the ship safely. "But they are victims as well."

Parents of surviving children said they sent their sons to sea thinking they would come back as men. But their boys returned home wanting to sleep with the lights on.

"He doesn't smile anymore, my son," said Kenji Shinoto, whose son, Daisuke, was on board the Ehime Maru.

The tragedy has shaken Uwajima's very identity.

The pride of this city was built on its harbor, where generations of fishermen made their livelihoods and made a name for the city by bringing back pearls.

Some parents with sons in the fisheries program at Uwajima Fisheries High School are wondering whether to pull them out of the program for which the school is known, the mayor said.

Now, school officials are deciding whether to merge the fisheries training program with one of the region's three other fisheries high schools just to keep existing.

And it could take two years to build a ship to replace the Ehime Maru.

Unlike their fathers before them, young men in Uwajima these days are seeking educations beyond the fishing trade school.

Road construction jobs have replaced fishing as the main industry for blue-collar workers.

Bullfighters are replacing pearl harvesters as the pride of the city. Apricot blossoms rather than fishing boats are the focal points of city brochures.

But if the Ehime Maru tragedy has focused more attention on the decline of the fishing industry, no one is talking publicly about it.

The city has raised about $100,000 to build a new ship and provide financial help for victims' families.

Petitions signed

Teachers at the high school, which is on spring break this week, have visited those they call the "saved students" who survived the shipwreck but have been staying home from school most days since the tragedy.

No one mentions death, let alone funerals or preparations for death rituals.

The most vocal thing local people have done in reaction to the accident has been to sign the petition to raise the ship, said Doi, who has collected 200,000 of about 1 million signatures himself.

He has taken petitions to Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, who visited Hawai'i this week and reiterated the people's request that the vessel be raised.

Eight of the nine rescued students returned to the school last week for a graduation ceremony with too many seats left vacant.

There, they displayed some of the items sent back from Hawai'i that had been floating remnants of the Ehime Maru.

Oil-stained boots are among the few physical connections to the missing, left for school boys to wash in polite silence.

Interpreter Fujiko Lowry contributed to this story.