Fate Sank 1912 | Type Steamship | |
SS Kiche Maru was a Japanese steamship that sank during a typhoon on 22 September 1912. Although more than 1,000 people died, the disaster has been overshadowed by the earlier loss (on 15 April 1912) of RMS Titanic, and by the fact that it was part of the casualties of a tropical storm in Southern Japan. Although the sinking of a ship was reported (as the "Kieko Maru," the "Keiko Maru", the "Kioko maru" and the "Kickermaru" in later accounts), it was in conjunction with a violent storm that sank hundreds of vessels. The destroyers Fubuki and Tachibana were sunk in Ise Bay, and the cities of Osaka and Nagoya sustained heavy damage. Kiche Maru, a passenger ship, foundered off the island of Honshū, and there were no survivors.
Although the sinking of the Japanese passenger ship was reported in the Western press as part of the news of the 1912 typhoon, and the information has been repeated in English-language lists of historic disasters, no contemporaneous Japanese accounts have been found to describe either the shipwreck, or the ship itself.