Five Ehime Maru victims honored at service
| • | Special report: Collision at Sea |
By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writer
Families of Ehime Maru victims, escorted by a police motorcade that shut down part of the Pali Highway during morning rush hour, received the welcome of Hawai'i's Buddhist community yesterday during cremation services for five victims of the Feb. 9 shipwreck.
Yesterday's private cremation service followed a memorial the night before, during which 13 local priests, Japanese officials and Navy officers joined with victims' families in a ritual of burning incense before five caskets draped with white chrysanthemums.
The remains of fisheries teacher Jun Nakata were the latest to be identified.
Mourners paid respects to 17-year-old students Katsuya Nomoto and Toshiya Sakashima as well as 47-year-old chief engineer Toshimichi Furuya, 49-year-old crewman Hiroshi Nishida and 60-year-old chief radio officer Hirotaka Segawa, who died eight months ago when the submarine USS Greeneville rammed their ship during a surfacing drill.
Nine aboard the Ehime Maru died.
Yesterday Navy divers found and recovered the eighth body. Six bodies have been identified so far.
Families of teachers Hiroshi Makizawa, 37, Jun Nakata, 33, and 17-year-old students Yusuke Terata and Takeshi Mizuguchi attended the service, unable to participate in funeral customs for their own loved ones.
While the Nakatas learned yesterday that Jun Nakata's body was the latest to be identified, the three other families are awaiting the identity of the two other bodies.
Terata's parents already have been told their son is presumed to have been swept out to sea, but divers are continuing to search the ship in the Navy's $60 million recovery effort.
Although grateful to have her husband's body returned, life is forever changed for families such as Naoko Nakata, who has moved away from the harbor town of Uwajima, Japan. Her husband, a teacher on his fifth trip to sea with Uwajima Fisheries High School, left behind a 5-year-old son and a daughter, now 17 months old and too young to remember him.
