The Japanese team had no previous experience of polar exploration (Image: John Dickie Collection/Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington NZ)

FOR a few weeks in January 1912, Antarctica was teeming with explorers. Roald Amundsen and his Norwegian party had reached the South Pole on 14 December and were speeding back to the coast. On 17 January, Robert Scott and the men of the British Antarctic expedition had arrived at the pole to find they had been beaten to it. Dejected, they began to retrace their steps in what turned out to be their final journey. Just then, a third man with polar aspirations arrived on the scene. Nobu Shirase was a little late but no less determined to cover himself in glory.

In the story of the race to the South Pole, Shirase is the invisible man. A Japanese explorer, his part in one of the greatest adventure stories of the 20th century is hardly known outside his own country. Yet as Scott was nearing the pole and with the world still unaware of Amundsen’s triumph, Shirase and the Japanese Antarctic expedition sailed into Antarctica’s Bay of Whales in the smallest ship ever to try its luck in these perilous waters. On 19 January 1912, the little wooden schooner sailed up to the edge of the Ross ice shelf and left Shirase and his men to scale the immense wall of ice ready for a daring dash south.

Lieutenant Shirase was a middle-aged army reservist who since boyhood had dreamed of becoming a polar explorer. In Japan, the very idea was startling. When Shirase was born, people were forbidden to leave the country on pain of death. The overthrow of the ruling dynasty in 1868 brought modernisation and new ideas, but they didn’t extend as far as polar exploration. Undeterred, Shirase toughened himself up in readiness. He didn’t drink or smoke. He spurned the warmth of a fire in winter and refused hot food and drinks. Like Amundsen, he initially set his sights on the North Pole. But after the American Robert Peary claimed to have reached it in 1909, both men hastily revamped their plans. Instead, like Scott, they would aim for the last big prize: the South Pole.


In January 1910, Shirase put his plans before the elected officials of Japan’s Imperial Diet. “Within three years,” he told the assembled politicians, “I vow to raise our Japanese imperial flag at the South Pole.” For many, the question wasn’t could he do it but what was the point? It wasn’t just about being first to the pole, Shirase said. It was also about science.

The agenda for would-be Antarctic explorers had been set 15 years earlier by the International Geographical Congress. As the last unknown continent, the congress declared, the Antarctic offered the chance to add to knowledge in almost every branch of science. So, like the British, Shirase presented his expedition as a quest for knowledge rather than a bid for personal glory. He would bring back rocks and fossils, make meteorological measurements and explore unknown parts of the continent.

The response was cool. Neither the government nor the public had much appetite for such a venture and the press poked fun at the whole idea. Shirase struggled both to raise funds and to find scientists to accompany him. His supporters accused the nation’s scientists of being too keen on home comforts and too cowardly to risk their lives for science. Who needed them anyway, argued one. It didn’t take an Einstein to collect rocks or jot down the temperature or wind speed.

A few months later, Japan’s former prime minister Shigenobu Okuma came to Shirase’s rescue. With Okuma’s backing, Shirase scraped together enough money to buy and equip a small schooner, quickly renamed the Kainan Maru, or “Southern Pioneer”. He eventually acquired a scientist, too, albeit not one known in the usual scientific circles.

At the end of November 1910, the Kainan Maru finally left Tokyo with 27 men and 28 Siberian dogs on board. Before leaving, Shirase confidently outlined his plans to the press. He would reach Antarctica in February, during the southern summer.

Then, like Amundsen and Scott, he would spend the winter exploring and preparing for his push to the pole the following spring: “On 15 September, when the winter will have ended, the party will proceed to the pole.” His men, he proclaimed, would travel more than 1400 kilometres over the ice in 155 days and “return to the rendezvous by the latter part of February 1912”.

Things didn’t go according to plan. The difficulty raising funds had already delayed the expedition. Bad weather delayed it further. The storm-battered Kainan Maru didn’t reach New Zealand until 8 February; Amundsen and Scott had already been in Antarctica a month and were now preparing for winter.

When the ship stopped at Wellington to take on supplies, New Zealand’s reporters flocked to the quayside. They were astonished. At 200 tonnes and 30 metres long, the “strange little three-masted vessel” was half the size of Amundsen’s ship, Fram, and a third the size of Scott’s Terra Nova. True, the hull was reinforced with extra planking and iron plate, but the ship had only the feeblest engine to help force its way through ice. Could it really survive in the unforgiving Southern Ocean?

Few doubted Shirase’s courage, but most reckoned the expedition to be ill-prepared and poorly equipped. For transport the Japanese had lightweight sledges, “toy things” made of bamboo and wood, and more than half their dogs had died en route to New Zealand. As for provisions, they were both peculiar and paltry. The European explorers were fuelled by pemmican – a high-energy mix of meat and lard. Did these men really intend to walk to the pole on a diet of rice and plum pickles, cured beans and dried cuttlefish?

Did the men really intend to walk to the pole on a diet of rice, plum pickles, cured beans and cuttlefish?

Then there were the team’s maps, or lack of them. According to The New Zealand Times, the ship’s only guide to Antarctic waters was a copy of part of a British admiralty chart marked with the route of Ernest Shackleton’s recent Nimrod expedition. Shirase had expected to obtain a chart in New Zealand. “Unless this expectation turns out to be correct, the Kainan Maru will have to be navigated south of latitude 60° south upon a photographic reproduction 8 inches by 10,” reported the paper.

But Shirase’s biggest challenge was time. Antarctica is only accessible by sea for a few weeks in summer and expeditions usually aimed to arrive in January or February. By March, ships risked being trapped in sea ice until the next spring. “Even with their determination and daring, our Japanese friends are running it rather fine,” opined The Press of Christchurch. Undeterred, on 11 February the Kainan Maru left Wellington and sailed straight into stormy weather and waves bigger than the captain had ever seen. By the end of the month the ship was picking its way through ice-dotted waters. Then, on 6 March, the lookout spied the Admiralty mountains, a string of peaks on the western side of Antarctica’s Ross Sea.

The Kainan Maru skirted the coast looking for a place to land. “We saw only icebergs, snow and penguins,” the chief officer later told The Sydney Morning Herald. The ice began to close in, threatening to trap them for the winter, an experience no one was likely to survive. With a deft piece of seamanship, the Kainan Maru’s captain wriggled the ship out of the ice and turned north. They would have to wait out the winter in warmer climes. On 1 May, the Kainan Maru unexpectedly sailed into Sydney Harbour.

Shirase’s arrival took Australia by surprise. Anti-Japanese sentiments were running high following Japan’s military victories in Russia and China and the people of Sydney were suspicious. With its little ship and one surviving dog, few believed the expedition was genuine. Were the Japanese furtively hunting new sealing grounds? Or were they spies checking out Sydney’s defences? Even if they were trying for the pole, many thought they shouldn’t be. According to the laws of exploring etiquette, Scott had announced his intentions first and others should wait their turn – something Amundsen was also criticised for.

Not everyone was hostile. A wealthy landowner in a posh Sydney suburb invited the Japanese team to camp on his land, and Shirase found an ally in geologist Tannatt Edgeworth David. The previous year, as part of the Nimrod expedition, David had reached the south magnetic pole. Shirase was a bona fide explorer, David told the press. He had made the mistake of starting out too late, but under the circumstances, he did well to get as far south as he did.

The pull of the pole

Six months later, with a fresh complement of dogs, Shirase was ready for a second attempt on Antarctica. He no longer aimed to reach the pole, he told reporters, but would confine himself to surveying and science. The Kainan Maru sailed on 19 November and this time the weather was good. On 21 December the ship crossed the Antarctic Circle and two weeks later they were again in sight of the Admiralty mountains. The ship continued eastwards, past McMurdo Sound where Scott had his base, and across the Ross Sea to the far side of the Ross ice shelf, close to Amundsen’s winter base (see map).

After a first failed attempt to land, Shirase decided to try again in the Bay of Whales, a natural harbour formed by a dent in the ice shelf. As the Kainan Maru neared the bay, the crew were startled to see another ship. It was the Fram, waiting for Amundsen’s return. There was still no news of either the Norwegian or the British teams.

Now, a year later than planned, Shirase and six men scaled the immense glassy face of the Ross ice shelf, and stood on an icy wasteland the size of France. What now? He was too late to catch Scott or Amundsen and he had said he would stick to science.

Yet Shirase still felt the pull of the pole. He had planned for this moment for so long – how could he come so close and stay so far? He might be out of the race, but he would still make a southward dash, experiencing the thrills and hardships of polar exploration he had always dreamed of. With provisions for 20 days, he and four men would see how far they could get with their dogs and “toy” sledges.

According to Shirase’s account published in Japan in 1913, the “dash patrol” set off on 20 January 1912, leaving two men at the edge of the ice shelf to make meteorological measurements. The patrol included the expedition’s scientist Terutaro Takeda and two expert dog handlers, Ainu men from Japan’s far north. For a week they struggled through one blizzard after another, holing up in their tents during the worst of the weather. The temperature fell to -25°C, and frostbite claimed some of the dogs. On 26 January, Shirase estimated there were enough provisions to continue for two more days.

Two days later, Shirase called a halt. Takeda calculated they had reached 80° 5 south and had travelled 250 kilometres. The men hoisted the Japanese flag, saluted the emperor and buried a can containing a list of their names. The return journey took three days.

While Shirase was away, the Kainan Maru dropped seven men on Edward VII Peninsula and then sailed eastward to survey the coastline. The exploring parties set out to investigate what they believed was virgin territory. Four men headed south, but were soon defeated by a wall of ice. The other three had more success. Marching south-west, they encountered “a flock of emperor penguins showing no signs of fear” (prompting one of the party to shake hands with one of them), and scaled several ice walls in an attempt to reach the nearby Alexandra mountains. After 14 hours, a blizzard and a narrow escape from an avalanche, they were thwarted by an unbridgeable crevasse. The men erected a sign to say they had been there and, after a quick detour for a glimpse beyond the mountains, returned to the coast.

On 3 February, all the men were back aboard the Kainan Maru and headed for home. The ship reached Tokyo in June 1912 – and Shirase was greeted like a hero. Yet his fame was short-lived and the expedition was more or less forgotten. Why?

Shirase was the victim of bad timing, says Ben McInnes, a Japanologist at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, Australia. “If Shirase had won government support, he would have reached Antarctica at the same time or perhaps earlier than Scott and Amundsen,” he says. In the event, his efforts were eclipsed by those of his rivals.

Wrong sort of hero

Even in Japan, Shirase’s fame soon evaporated. It was his misfortune to be the wrong sort of hero. In the new, modern Japan action men had been supplanted by tortured existentialist types. It was a change that left Shirase facing far worse than fading celebrity. The expedition had saddled him with huge debts. His patron Okuma had lost interest and his only hope of settling his debts was by selling his expedition memoirs and film footage from Antarctica. “But stories of the Boy’s Own genre were no longer popular and theatre-goers preferred the new ‘magical ninja’ movies to documentaries,” says McInnes. Shirase died in 1946, poverty-stricken and forgotten.

Outside Japan, little was heard of the expedition until 1933, when the first English-language version of events appeared in The Geographical Journal. By this time, the Scott-Amundsen story was legendary and Shirase was little more than a footnote. Things might have been different if his expedition had made its mark in the rapidly expanding field of Antarctic science. “But the scientific results were minimal,” says historian William Stevenson, currently based at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.

Unknown to Shirase, Amundsen’s men had already visited the “unexplored” part of Edward VII Peninsula. Takeda hadn’t enhanced the expedition’s reputation either. Delving among the archives, Stevenson has discovered Takeda’s scientific credentials consisted of a brief stint as a professor’s assistant followed by a rapid succession of school teaching posts. At 24, he dropped off the radar and only reappeared to sign up for Shirase’s expedition. Takeda returned from Antarctica with strong views on how ice shelves formed and convinced that Edward VII Peninsula was an island – two hot topics at the time. He was wrong about both (Endeavour, DOI: 10.1016/j.endeavour.2010.11.002).

Shirase never reached the pole. Nor did he contribute much to science – but then nor did Amundsen, whose only interest was in being first to the pole. Yet Shirase’s expedition was heroic. He and his men were the first non-Europeans to explore Antarctica. They travelled beyond 80° south, one of only four teams to have gone so far south at the time. What’s more, they did it all on a shoestring and with no previous experience – and no one died.

Today, Shirase’s hometown of Nikaho has a museum celebrating his pioneering expedition. Japan’s Antarctic research vessel is called Shirase, and there are several features of the once mysterious continent that bear his name.

“Even though they were never the first to see an uncharted stretch of coast or a new peak, they were nevertheless among the earliest explorers to visit that part of the Antarctic,” says Stevenson. “The expedition was clearly a pioneering effort in terms of Japanese history and for that matter non-European history. It was also a great adventure.”