doitfortheculture

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« The hell of Hosono Masabumi »

Masabumi Hosono was a civil servant who worked for the Japanese Ministry of Transport. In 1910, he was sent by his employer to Russia to study rail infrastructure. After two years of hard work, when he is about forty years old, he must return home. He first went to London, then headed for Southampton and boarded the famous Titanic on April 10, 1912. He was then the only Japanese on this imposing ship.

It was around 11:40 pm, on the night of April 14 to 15, that the Titanic collides with the iceberg that will be fatal to it. Hosono says that he was awakened by a knock on the door of his cabin and went outside. But, because of his status as a foreigner, he was ordered to go to the lower decks, far from the lifeboats on the upper deck.

The "women and children first" rule is raging for the climb on the rescue channels. In the crowd, Masabumi Hosono manage to sneak on the bridge. As he sees death, without any possible way out, an officer writes "There is still room for two here!". Hosono tries his luck to survive and, hiding his face with his jacket, he manages to set sail on the makeshift canoe. The water around is littered with debris and corpses.

The liner Carpathia arrives around 3:30 am at the scene of the tragedy and it takes several hours to get all the shipwrecked on board. The N10 canoe is one of the last to be recovered around 7:30 am, according to the testimony of one of the passengers. It is during the four days spent on the Carpathia that Hosono will start writing his newspaper.

He reports his observations of the shipwreck, confides in the emotions that crossed it and also mentions the boredom of these days aboard the Carpathia, the promiscuity resulting from the overcrowding of the ship and the bad weather that raised fears of a new shipwreck. Alone, speaking bad English, Hosono felt particularly isolated and suffered the mockery of sailors for whom the survival of an Asian was necessarily suspicious.

The Carpathia arrives in New York on April 18 at 10:30 am, Hosono goes to the office of the Mitsui trading company where friends lend him money to go home. And while waiting for a ship to leave San Francisco for Japan, he tells his story to the local Japanese community.

But this is far from the end of his ordeal. He then returned to Japan to join his wife and children. Japanese honour is very strict, so this Titanic survivor is despised and dishonoured. The national press does not mince its words: "Shame on the country! ", "Dishonour has a name: Masabumi Hosono! ".

Indeed, Japanese culture values the cult of sacrifice, inspired by the famous samurai spirit.

He is not the one who survived but the one who left the ship. In textbooks, it was used as the example not to follow, illustrated as the worst dishonour done in Japan.

His career also took a hit, he was dismissed from the ministry that employed him in May 1913 but his skills were too valuable and he was re-employed the following month under the status of simple contractor.

He died as a broken man in 1939 and was buried in the Tama cemetery in Tokyo. His disastrous reputation pursued him beyond death, when a Japanese liner sanked in 1954, we did not fail to recall his story... For having had "misfortune" (or luck?) To survive, this Japanese had to endure a fate perhaps even worse than death. An "eternal" public shame. At least, until the mores change.

Then Masabumi Hosono was forgotten for a few decades because the notes he had taken were for a personal purpose, with no will to publish unlike other survivors of the shipwreck.

It was his granddaughter, Yuriko, who made it public thanks to the tremendous success of James Cameron's film, which will push many enthusiasts to collect all possible information about the mythical liner. Masabumi Hosono's name was thus rehabilitated in a new light and his words became a moving testimony to a historical event. Just for this fact, Japan can now thank him.

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« The atomic bomb of Nagasaki »

On August 9, 1945, over the city of Kokura in Japan, the Bockscar plane carrying the "Fat Man" atomic bomb must to change course, too many clouds prevented the bombing of the city.

They then decide to fall back on their second choice " Nagasaki", at 11:02 a.m. the 4-ton bomb is dropped.

Fat Man triggers 500 m from the ground, a double flash crosses the sky and then it's the explosion.

The force of the explosion corresponds to 21,000 TNT, an atomic fungus rises to 18km in the sky.

On the ground, the heat reaches more than 4000 degrees, the shock wave causes winds of more than 1000km/h that ravage the city

It is a disaster, 40,000 people die instantly and 6km2 of the city are destroyed in a flash.

Then a firestorm broke out on Nagasaki and thousands of people were injured.

It is estimated that 80,000 other people will die of their injuries, in the days and then in the months following the attack.

The disaster causes fewer deaths in Nagasaki than in Hiroshima, especially thanks to the hills that protect part of the city.

5 days later, Japan capitulated, the two atomic bombs (Nagasaki and Hiroshima) will have killed 240,000 people.

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"The pillars of creation"

The "Pillars of Creation" are located 6,500 light-years from Earth, in our galaxy, the Milky Way. More specifically, they are in the Eagle Nebula. They were made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope, which took a first shot of it in 1995 revisited in 2014.

They are clouds of dust and gas conducive to the formation of new stars. We can see very young stars in the form of bright red spheres sometimes accompanied by eight diffraction peaks. Lava-like wavy lines on the edges of dust clouds form when supersonic plasma jets of young stars collide with the matter of the columns.

picture revisited by James Webb.

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Ronnie Spector "Hell is the others. ”

Veronica Spector Greenfield, born Veronica Yvette Bennett, is an American singer. She formed the doo-wop group « Les Ronettes »in 1957 with her older sister Estelle Bennett and their cousin Nedra Talley.

In search of a recording contract, they first signed with Colpix Records and produced by Stu Phillips. After releasing a few singles on Colpix without success, they were signed by Phil Spector at Philles Records.

From their debut at Phil Spector's record company, the Ronnettes exploded the charts with their titles "Baby" (1963), Baby I love you (1963), they became one of the most popular song groups of their time.

It was in 1968 that Veronica Bennett (Ronnie) married Phil Spector, whose name she took professionally. In 1969 they adopted a son (Donté Philipp.) Then two years later, Phil Spector surprised him by adopting two twins Louis and Gary for Christmas.

Throughout her relationship with Spector, Ronnie testified that her husband had subjected her to years of psychological torment and had sabotaged her career by prohibiting her from performing. She said that he had surrounded the house with barbed wire and guard dogs and confiscated his shoes to prevent him from leaving.

Ronnie added that on the rare occasions when he let her go out alone, she had to drive with a life-size mannequin from Spector, wearing the same headgear that he used to wear, sitting in the passenger seat.

No longer bearing the situation and no longer having control over herself, she began to voluntarily drink and excessively, in order to attend the meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous to escape from home. Ronnie also recalled that Phil Spector had installed a gold coffin with a glass lid in the basement, promising that he would kill her and come and contemplate her corpse if she ever left it.

In her 1990 memoirs, Be My Baby, Ronnie explained that she had fled their mansion barefoot and without any property with the help of her mother in 1972. "I knew that if I didn't leave, I would die there," she said. In their 1974 divorce agreement, Ronnie Spector lost all her phonographic recording rights, after Phil Spector threatened her to hire a hired killer to kill her. She received $25,000, a used car and a monthly alimony of $2,500 for five years.

In 1998 Ronnie Spector took the courage to testify against her ex-husband, accusing him of having frequently pointed at her with a weapon during their marriage and threatened to kill her unless she gave up custody of their children.

In 1982 she marries her second husband, Jonathan Greenfield, and takes her last name.

Ronnie Spector died in Danburry on January 12, 2022 at the age of 78 from cancer.

As for Phil Spector, on April 13, 2009, he was convicted of the murder of Lana Clarkson, He died in Corcoran prison in California, where Charles Manson died in November 2017.

A few weeks before his death, he had given an interview to the English newspaper, it read "I would say I'm relatively crazy. I have inner demons fighting me."

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« The Hindenburg air disaster of 1937 »

The LZ 129 Hindenburg is the largest dirigible of the time and its Daimler-Benz engines are very powerful. The machine covers the transatlantic link in an unprecedented way. By exposing it to the eyes of the world, particularly through the media, the company Luftschiffbau Zeppelin tends to promote the technological advances of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany. The dirigible was also widely used during the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936.

The aircraft bore the name of Hindenburg in tribute to the German Chancellor who had preceded Hitler (The giant of the air was to be called by the name of Adolf Hitler proposed by his Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels in the spring of 1936, but as a precaution the Führer decided to give it the name of Marshal Paul Von Hindenburg, former hero of the First World War.) Nazi propaganda required that crosses be painted on the dirigible.

In addition to being one of the largest airships ever known during this time, (It was 250m long). He was often compared to the Titanic whose nickname "The Titanic of the Air".

Hindenburg will experience both a period of great success and a tragic end. But unlike the first whose shipwreck did not seal the fate of sea crossings, the forfeiture of the LZ 129 Hindenburg will end the period of dirigibles

The inauguration flight of the LZ 129 Hindenburg took place on March 4, 1936 in Friedrichshafen, Germany. It operates for 14 months without incidents, and operates several promotional flights.

The airship balloon was originally designed to be inflated with helium. But this gas was mainly produced in the United States, which restricts sales to Germany. The Zeppelin company had therefore chosen hydrogen for the lifting of the aircraft, which was more economical, but also more dangerous.

It was during his landing in Lakehurst, New Jersey (80 km from New York), on May 6, 1937, that the irreparable occurred. After a flight without history, the airship is delayed by a storm on the American coast. The dirigible gently approaches its mooring mast; but at the back of the envelope, a hydrogen leak not detected by the crew (the gas being colorless and odorless) forms a highly flammable pocket.

Suddenly, a wreath of flames, probably caused by the contact of a mooring cable with the ground, gushed out at the back of the airship and causes the explosion of the hydrogen from the envelope. In just 34 seconds the Hindenburg ignites and crashes to the ground, forming a gigantic blaze rising from the aircraft's deformed carcass.

The dirigible will cause a total of 36 deaths. (29 deaths on the spot, 6 wounded will die a few hours later.)

Nazi Germany, weakened by this failure, will use the event and the lack of scientific explanation to serve its worst conspiracy theories, and fuel anti-Semitism in the country, under Hitler's impetus.

The destruction of the LZ 129 Hindenburg is a publicized event around the world. The shot (above) photographed by journalist Sam Shere will forever remain one of his most popular images.

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« Louis Zamperini » The Invincible

Born in 1917 in the suburbs of New York, to Italian immigrant parents, this character with an extraordinary destiny participated in the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. He met Adolf Hitler there, before joining the American army, five years later.

On May 23, 1943, his plane crashed in the Pacific Ocean. He will be one of the only survivors of the crash, drifting 47 days before being taken prisoner in a Japanese camp, where he will be tortured for long months. Upon his release, at the end of the war, in May 1945, he discovered that the army declared him dead.

Upon his return to the United States, he will suffer from serious post-traumatic disorders, before returning to Japan to meet his jailer, Mutsuhiro Watanabe, one of the 40 war criminals most wanted by General MacArthur's men. He will make a new attempt, without result, in 1998, when he was invited to carry the Olympic flame at the Winter Olympics in Nagano.

Having overcome the most incredible events in his life, the Olympic rider and hero of the Second World War Louis Zamperini never stogged back from any challenge.

He had recently faced the greatest challenge of his existence, a pneumonia. After 40 days of fighting the disease, he died peacefully in the presence of his entire family, His inimitable courage and fighting spirit have never been as apparent as in recent days.

He died on July 2, 2014 at the age of 97.

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« The Napalm Girl » Autor, Nick Ut alias Huỳnh Công Út.

Kim Phuc Phan Thi was only nine years old when the South Vietnamese army dropped bombs on his village on August 8, 1972.

In the foreground, we see a terrorized little girl running to escape the flames that devour her. She screams in pain because her skin and clothes have been charred by napalm. This "vicious weapon, flammable mixture of gelled gasoline, phosphorus and plastic that sticks to the skin and burns tissues to the bone". Around her, other children and soldiers. Immediately after, Nick Ut takes care of the little girl he transports to the nearest hospital, and goes to Saigon.

the photograph is taken with a Leïca or Nikon camera, equipped with a 300 mm lens and a 400 ASA film.