1912 (25 page)

After dropping off the Main Landing Party the
Kainan-maru
left the Bay of Whales on 19 January and headed towards King Edward VII Land, sailing as far east as 155°W—a record unsurpassed until 1934. The Japanese later considered this part of the expedition to be ‘far more fortunate and successful'. They became the first people to land on the coast of King Edward VII Land, finding a bay further east than either Scott or Shackleton had reached—which in turn allowed them to be the first to explore the interior from the seaward side.

Scaling the ice barrier, two members of the expedition managed to reach the Alexandra Mountains, first described by Scott. Looking beyond they saw a new mountain range branching off south-southeast. It was not necessarily Carmen Land, but it was yet more proof that King Edward VII Land formed the eastern limit of the Great Ice Barrier. They left a memorial post with a list of those on this part of the expedition, announcing their visit, and the
Kainan-maru
headed back west to the Bay of Whales.

In a bid to help finance the expedition Shirase had sold film rights to M. Pathe, which sent a junior technician from its Tokyo
office for the second voyage. Cameraman Taizumi Yasunao was only twenty-three when he joined the expedition in Sydney, and was not keen on the trip to Antarctica. But he was at least partly placated by a twentyfold increase in his monthly salary and ¥5000 in life insurance.

Taizumi may not have had quite the same eye as some of the better-known Antarctic photographers of the time, but he managed to capture the essence of the expedition. Unfortunately, a large amount of the footage was lost on the return journey due to poor conditions; but there was enough to make a unique film of almost an hour's length that was a huge success when shown back in Japan. The silent black-and-white flickering images are an eerie but enchanting record of this unusual expedition and its work in Antarctica.

In the M. Pathe film is one of the funniest—and also more alarming—pieces of Antarctic footage, an ‘experiment' that went largely unreported at the time. The film was not distributed overseas, and before the recent publication of the complete English translation of the report on Shirase's expedition, most of the Japanese team's activity was related to outsiders through a brief summary translated by an enthusiastic Norwegian whaler, Ivar Hamre, which was published in 1933. In this article Hamre reports that, after the
Kainan-maru
reached King Edward VII Land, the expedition members encountered ‘a flock of Emperor Penguins showing no signs of fear. One of the men presumed to “shake hands” with one of these beings so human in their behaviour. But his patting seems to have been taken up in a way quite their own, for the result was a round of beak-strokes from one individual to another until it came back to the starting-point and the circuit was closed.'

The new translation is quite different. After finding more than half a dozen emperor penguins, ‘One of the expedition members punched a penguin to see what would happen. The
stupid creature did not seem to grasp the fact that it was one of the men who had punched it, and assuming that it had been pecked by the penguin standing next to it, it pecked its neighbour back with its long thin beak. That penguin in turn pecked the next penguin, and so on until finally all six penguins had been pecked.' Later attempts to do the same thing were recorded in Taizumi's film, with Japanese team members herding groups of penguins, and apparently punching and kicking them as they try to get away. No doubt, when shown to the public, it must have caused much amusement.

After considerable interaction with the local wildlife the
Kainan-maru
hugged the coast and made one last, major discovery: the team reached the very edge of King Edward VII Land and the start of the Great Ice Barrier. Now, finally, the eastern limit of the barrier was firmly fixed. Ross had first found this impressive feature of Antarctica in 1841 and defined the westernmost edge at McMurdo Sound; Shirase's expedition located the last piece of the puzzle at what they called Okuma Bay. For a small ship it was an impressive achievement: the Japanese succeeded where Ross, Scott and Shackleton had failed.

In Okuma Bay the men observed an unusual phenomenon. On 29 January they saw large bergs with rocks embedded in them. As early as 1839, before Charles Darwin became a household name, the great scientist had observed that few if any icebergs in the northern hemisphere had been found to contain rocks, and yet this appeared quite common in the Southern Ocean. In another of his prescient contributions, Darwin described some of the early sealing expeditions and suggested, ‘Transportation of fragments of rock by ice throws light on the problem of erratic boulders which has so long perplexed geologists. If one iceberg in a thousand or ten thousand transports its fragment, the bottom of the Antarctic Sea and the shores of its
islands must already be scattered with masses of foreign rock, the counterpart of erratic boulders of the northern hemisphere.' The rocks on the seabed signified past convoys of bergs had been released into the Southern Ocean from an undiscovered land in the south.

By collecting a sample the Japanese hoped to improve their understanding of the geology of King Edward VII Land. Much as Shackleton had collected geological samples on the Beardmore Glacier, this was a chance to collect material from the largely inaccessible coast. A small boat was sent out; frighteningly, after the crew had collected mud and gravel samples from the floating ice, one of the nearby bergs rose dramatically out of the ocean, having calved off the shelf floor, accompanied by the sound of thunder. Ice and water were thrown violently into the air—miraculously, the men survived.

There were other ways to collect scientific samples that were considerably safer, at least for the expedition members. Today we are not supposed to approach any animal so that it alters its behaviour, but in 1912 all the Antarctic expeditions captured seals and penguins for food and scientific samples. During much of the Japanese explorers' time in the Antarctic, penguins were caught. One of the ‘important guests' captured earlier was strangled for food and the contents of its stomach analysed. Three stones were found, each around six millimetres in diameter. Finding the rest of the stomach was made up of small fish and realising they could not feed their new guests, the men killed the other birds using chloroform; but, as the official report remarked later in rather macabre fashion, ‘it still took a long time for them all to die.'

Penguins have long been known to have stones in their stomachs. Even today, though, the reasons for this are uncertain. Ideas range from helping with ballast while diving, to digesting stones to help break down food in the gizzard, to
accidentally mistaking rock fragments as fish. Regardless, many of the stones collected seem to come from the seabed, providing a handy way of gaining insight into the local geology below the ice and waves.

Reaching the Bay of Whales on 1 February the Japanese were shocked to see that the bay had changed completely. In two weeks most of the sea ice that had covered the area on their arrival had broken up and drifted out of the bay, to be replaced by drifting floes and ice lumps of different sizes. With the conditions too poor to get Shirase and his men off the ice, the
Kainan-maru
stayed offshore overnight. Unlike Amundsen, the Japanese feared the stability of the barrier around the bay.

Shirase and his six men were hurriedly loaded on board over the next two days, when conditions temporarily improved. Once again the weather deteriorated and the ship was forced to leave in haste on 4 February. Twenty dogs were left behind, marooned on an uninhabited ice shelf, chasing the departing vessel with howls of anguish. The loss was felt deeply: Shirase remembered them in his morning and evening prayers to his final days. With heavy hearts the Japanese turned north and headed home, via New Zealand.

Shirase and his men returned heroes: ‘we left the country out of favour of the people and were welcomed back into public favour and recognition.' Despite there being no national tradition of exploration or whaling in the Antarctic region, the team had come home safely after making a sizeable contribution to the scientific understanding of Antarctica. Shirase was immediately invited to regale the imperial family with stories from the expedition. The achievement was widely celebrated and a parade in Tokyo was dedicated to the returning explorers. Telegrams
were received from afar, including one from Edgeworth David, written as soon as he heard of their safe return to Wellington, congratulating Shirase on his scientific success in the south.

Shortly after, the M. Pathe film of the expedition was shown around Japan and China, raising the profile of the expedition still further. It also raised a phenomenal amount of money, estimated to have been in the order of ¥100,000, but this all went to M. Pathe; Shirase had sold the rights for a fraction of this amount. And yet, even with all the publicity, not everyone was convinced of the leader's claims about his exploits. No doubt to Shirase's chagrin, his home town was highly sceptical, and it was only when the film was shown that the locals believed him.

A Record of Antarctica
, the official expedition report, hints at a Japanese territorial claim while inviting the reader to ‘the wonderful realm of Antarctica, where the wild ice of mountains towers high into the sky and the rising sun now shines in splendour by both day and night, and shall never set'. But the expedition's story and almost all of its discoveries were, naturally, reported in Japanese. Few overseas were aware of their findings, beyond a small number of individuals who had contact with Shirase's team—most prominently, David—or who read the occasional brief report in western newspapers and journals. The film of Shirase's expedition was not distributed globally. Books were the primary means of telling the world about the Japanese exploits, and they were in a language not many outside Shirase's homeland understood.

Consequently, an expedition that had left for Antarctica amid much controversy returned to applause and, almost as quickly, to anonymity. The bulk of the scientific results were published as a series of appendices at the back of the official account of the expedition, and remained largely untapped. Although an English translation of these reports was released as a series of discrete papers in the Japanese journal
Antarctic Research
during the late
1950s, the papers were only picked up by the small research community that is Antarctic science. The rest of the world carried on much as if the Japanese expedition had never happened.

The language barrier is typified by the expedition's original public claim to succeed or perish in the attempt on the pole. In Japanese the word
Nankyoku
, the objective of the expedition, means both Antarctica as a whole and the South Pole. To those in the English-speaking world who took notice, the effort appeared a failure: the team did not reach the pole. But in Japan the expedition was billed a success and public statements stressed the great significance of the discoveries.

The team's findings made a particular contribution to understanding King Edward VII Land, and how it and the barrier related to Antarctica as a whole. The Norwegians had collected samples from King Edward VII Land, and reported, ‘They consist of granitic rocks and crystalline schists, and are identical with those brought by the southern party from Mount Betty beside Axel Heiberg Glacier in 85°S. Moreover, they agree so closely with the rocks of South Victoria Land that we can now say that an identity of structure has been established all round the Ross Barrier. Edward Land undoubtedly seems to belong to the Plateau formation of Victoria Land, and the presumption grows in strength that the Ross Sea is a rift valley.'

The Norwegians were only partially correct. The samples the Japanese collected around Antarctica, including those found within the penguin stomachs, were not entirely the same as those taken in Victoria Land. The volcanic rocks supported the evidence of rifting in the Earth's crust, but pointed to an early formation of King Edward VII Land, separate to the eastern Antarctic. The failure of the Japanese to find the most recent rock types of Victoria Land only reinforced this conclusion. Hints of a geological connection to New Zealand suggested a much more complex history than first thought.