Soon he began collaborations with a number of artists, in particular a self-reliant outcast named Gyotei Mano. During the difficult gossip years, Hosono commissioned Mano to paint landscapes and golden dragons on detachable sliding screens, with the probable intent, his daughter believed, of carrying something beautiful with him to their new smaller home, if and when he had to sell the family house. Fumiko remembered the bamboo bushes and snow-capped Mount Fuji on eight different silk sheets set in solid rosewood frames. In particular, she remembered “a majestic dragon that had cloud-piercing gold eyes and claws—each, on either side of the large partitioning screen.”
Eventually the Hosonos did have to move, to a house that Mr. Hosono designed and built near the Higashi-Nakano railway station in Nakano, Tokyo. With no guarantee that they would keep even this home, Hosono continued his collaboration with artists. He produced for each of his children two painted scrolls—among them Fumiko’s long-remembered and cherished painting of pine trees and a flock of cranes set against the rising sun. Hosono was passing along not only his love of art and architecture but also gifts he hoped would become seeds to awaken any artistic talents in his children, or even in his children’s children’s children.
History tried to intervene again, naturally.
On September 1, 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake, ranging in magnitude from 7.9 to 8.3, leveled most of Tokyo and its surrounding areas, including Nakano. The port city of Yokohama, forty-six miles away from Tokyo, was also leveled. According to survivors’ accounts, the clay earth moved like a storm at sea for a minimum of four minutes. Thirty-seven miles from the epicenter, the tremors displaced Kamakura’s Great Buddha statue almost two feet. The statue was carved from a single block of stone and weighed ninety-three tons. More than a hundred thousand people were killed.
Japan’s newspapers at the time were no more reliable than America’s Hearst newspapers of the same period, with rumors and accusations promptly “scooped” as news. Quake-clouded well water led to rumors that Korean immigrants were poisoning wells, and the rumors were printed as news. This led to vigilante roadblocks throughout Tokyo and Yokahama, where (until the army intervened), passersby were being stopped and tested for accents and other indicators of ethnic identity. Many who failed to pronounce words properly were killed; the lucky ones were turned back whence they had come. Chinese, Okinawans, and even Japanese citizens who spoke Hiroshima’s distinctive lilting dialect were often identified as foreigners.
Hosono, a speaker of foreign languages who had naturally developed an accent, faced significant danger if he attempted to travel. He stayed safely at his small, mostly intact home through fifty-seven aftershocks and the typhoon that quickly followed. The house must have been designed quite well. Like a lifeboat, it rode the waves of liquefaction. Every member of his family survived. Even his silk artwork endured unharmed.
During the next two years, Hosono’s talents were needed full-time for the repair of the railway system. After two years of repairs, he began teaching engineering and continued to do so until he was stricken suddenly ill in 1939 at the age of sixty-eight.
According to Fumiko, despite her father’s illness and “just days before his death, he had the grades for all of his students ready. Unable to go to the college, a school official came to him and [Father] handed him the list of marks. The act moved the official quite deeply.”
Six years later, on May 29, 1945, the region was leveled by one of World War II’s largest B-29 firebomb raids. Once again, the Hosono family and the delicate silk paintings survived.
In the aftermath of World War II, Hosono’s example of persevering, remaining fiercely independent no matter what anyone else thought, lived on within his family. Artistic abilities and a love of technology also seemed to live on. Hosono’s grandson Haruomi Hosono became a very successful musician in the 1980s technoband YMO. An orchestrator of the group’s electronic keyboard, Kae Matsumoto, also came from a family of survivor types, bringing together lineages from the Titanic and Hiroshima. Unlike most techno or new wave bands of the 1980s (famous for the “one-hit wonder” syndrome), YMO’s popularity grew slowly and steadily, remaining very successful a hundred years after Masabumi Hosono had left the dock at Southampton.
32
Destination Unknown
If we Americans could find a way to coexist with the Russians—after decades of a declared willingness to incinerate each other and take the rest of the mammals, and the birds, and most of the trees with us—then anyone could find a way, and perhaps the survival value of human intelligence might be proved after all. “The first thing that must be asked about future man,” said Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man, “is whether he will be alive, and will know how to keep alive, and not whether it is a good thing that he should be alive.”
When I returned to the Keldysh in 2003, along with several NASA astrobiologists and most of the Expedition Titanic XIII team, there was much disagreement between Russian and American political leaders over the Iraq War. It did not matter. Aboard the Keldysh, the first words exchanged were a renewal of the vow that we were, and always would be, family.
Our mission on Expedition X-Treme Life was to explore and film the hydrothermal vent zones from the Azores all the way down to the equator. Roy Cullimore, Lori Johnston, and I had already observed the activities of more than twenty bacterial and three fungal species living within the Titanic’s rusticle community, among them the iron-loving bacteria. Most important, sulfur-metabolizing microbes called Archaea were present. The Titanic’s steel was sulfur-rich, and the microbial communities thriving around mid-ocean volcanic vents were sustained largely by an ecosystem based on hydrogen sulfide.
So it had been logical for us to suspect, all these years, that the Titanic’s rusticle consortium originated at vents hundreds of miles upwind of the Titanic. No one had yet proved that rusticles were living around iron-rich mineral deposits at the vents, but that was because no one ever set out to specifically look for them.
Our exploration of the Titanic had revealed that iron was not the only metal on which the rusticles thrived. Copper and zinc would serve just as well. The organism was very opportunistic and very adaptable, and the hydrothermal vents were becoming known as sources for all of the major metals (to such an extent that some of the most amazing and fragile biological communities on Earth were beginning, much to our alarm, to attract the attention of mining interests).
JULY 28, 2003
RUSSIAN RESEARCH VESSEL KELDYSH
EXPEDITION X-TREME LIFE
The NASA people just did not seem to understand the Russian tendency to sidestep high-tech bells and whistles and make everything in the Mirs able to be repaired on site, rather than having to flip switches and activate a redundant piece of equipment if its twin in the first compartment burned out. The Russian idea of redundancy was to have two Mirs, each with a mutual rescue capability. If all of the redundant equipment failed in the Alvin or the Nautile and surfacing became impossible, one had to hope that there was another submersible in the same ocean, no more than two days away.