Maria Karagiannaki presents, as part of the series of broadcasts on the Asia Minor Catastrophe, the first part of the tribute to the heroic figures of 1922.
She was guided in this tribute by the award-winning, in Greece and abroad, animation film, “Tokei Maru”, by director and animator Zachos Samoladas.
His extensive research in the archives of shipping companies in key ports of Asia and the Far East, with collaborators both in Japan and Greek expatriate researchers, descendants of rescued refugees in Smyrna of 1922, revealed, a century later, the shocking story of the Japanese ship “Tokei Maru” and its heroic captain, T. Norito, rescuing them from historical oblivion.
The book “Tokei Maru” by Barbounakis Publications is a combination of historical research and fiction, as 100 years later the name of the captain and the ship’s course in the Mediterranean are still under investigation.
The program “Narratives” serves as an audio documentary to chronicle and bring to life the memory of the heroic Japanese captain and crew of the merchant ship “Tokei Maru”, which saved thousands of refugees, both Greeks and Armenians, in the burning Smyrna of 1922.
“Japanese captain T. Norito, in the burning Smyrna of 1922…”.
“…when the Japanese captain, moved by the savage massacres and the pleas of the refugees, sent all the boats of the ship to board as many refugees as possible, officers of the Kemalist army, surrounded the boats and threatened to sink them. Then the Japanese captain, rushing there in person, declared to the Kemalist officers that if they touched a single hair of the refugees, he would consider it an insult to the Japanese flag and would appeal to the Government for immediate satisfaction. Hearing this threat, the Kemalists, after consulting with their leader, were forced to leave the refugees on board the Japanese vessel alone”. The newspaper “EMPROS”; title, “The brave stand of the Japanese”, article of September 4, 1922, (Julian calendar).