Kashima Maru

The S.S. Kashima Maru was a Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) trans-Pacific passenger liner. This photo is from around 1920. NYK produced many very beautiful ship postcards.

In World War II, the Kashima Maru, then being used as a transport ship, was torpedoed and sunk by the USS Bonefish in 1943.

P.S. This post was being inundated with spam comments for some reason, so I have closed it to new comments. My apologies.

Japan, Hozugawa Rapids

If you want to travel in the tracks of the Prince of Romania and the Prince of Wales in the 1920s, as well as a number of other royal visitors, you may want to take a scenic boat trip down the Hozugawa Rapids in Japan. The scenery is supposed to be beautiful. It's a little hard to tell from black and white postcards, but this old hand-painted one is much more colorful. It was in with the other Hozugawa postcards, so I am assuming that it is the same location, but I can't be sure.

I love how they're all wearing hats.

Here are the backs of the cards in the same order.

I'm at the Imperial Hotel. Where are You?

The architect who steals my covers recently returned from the annual Frank Lloyd Wright conference with this piece of memorabilia.

 

I'm re-posting the card from a previous post that shows the hotel itself, along with the background information.

At the turn of the century, there was an increased demand for rooms for foreign visitors to Japan. In order to meet that demand, a directive was issued to build the Imperial Hotel. Frank Lloyd Wright was hired for the project in 1916. He designed just about every aspect of the hotel, including doorknobs and carpets.

According to the architect who steals my covers, these are some of the significant aspects of the hotel:

1. The job was an important one for Wright because he had no work at the time. He was still recovering from the murder of his mistress Mamah Borthwick-Cheney, who had been hacked to death with a hatchet along with her two children at Wright's house at Taliesin. The murder was committed by one of Wright's servants, who had just served them lunch moments before. After that, the servant also burned down Wright's precious Taliesin house. Frank Lloyd Wright was at his office in Chicago at the time. The scandal of the affair with Borthwick-Cheney and her subsequent murder diminished Wright's appeal to prospective clients.
2.  The Imperial Hotel managed to withstand the great Kanto earthquake in 1923, which destroyed just about every other building in the vicinity.
   
3. The hotel was demolished in 1967 because the property values were so high that a two-story building simply didn't make financial sense. The center part of the building was preserved and reconstructed at the Meiji Mura Museum, an outdoor architectural museum in Inuyama.

Kyoto Station - Japan

This card shows the third incarnation of Kyoto Station. The first station was built in 1889 and replaced by a newer station 1n 1914. That station burned down in 1950 and was replaced by this one in 1952.

The current Kyoto Station doesn't look a bit like this one. It was built in 1997 and includes a shopping mall, hotel, and movie theater. It is one of Japan's largest buildings. Click here to see what it looks like now.

Here's the back of the card.

SS Tenyo Maru

The SS Tenyo Maru was a Japanese passenger liner built in 1908. At that time it was the heaviest ship launched in Japan or in the Pacific Ocean. As far as I can tell, this is the first of three ships named the Tenyo Maru. There was another passenger liner that was eventually requisitioned for World War II, and there was (is) also a fishing vessel of the same name that was involved in a nasty oil spill.

The Ships list. com has this to say about the Tenyo Maru:
13,454 gross tons, length 558ft x beam 61.9ft, two funnels, two masts, triple screw, speed 20 knots, accommodation for 275-1st, 54-2nd and 800-3rd class passengers. Built 1908 by Mitsubishi Dockyard & Eng. Works, Nagasaki for Toyo Kisen K.K., Tokyo and used on Hong Kong - Yokohama - San Francisco passenger services. In 1926 the company became Nippon Yusen K.K., Tokyo. 1930 laid up, 1933 scrapped in Japan.
 
This postcard shows the reading room with its amazing furnishings. The ship is initially reported to have had a room where Chinese passengers could go to smoke opium. There must have been a limit to the amount though. Other reports I have seen (including one in the Overland Monthly, Volume 58, 1911) refer to opium being seized in searches of ocean liners coming from the Orient. In one seizure in 1911, eighty tins of opium were taken from the Tenyo Maru.

Source

My favorite story is from Time Magazine, 1929, which details the plight of Mrs. Sui'e Ying Kao, wife of the Chinese Vice Consul at San Francisco, who imported a large quantity of opium on the Tenyo Maru, thinking that she had diplomatic immunity. Alas, the customs agents disagreed. They confiscated $600,000 worth of opium (1929 prices!) from Mrs. Kao. In any case, the reading room shown above seems like the perfect place for smoking opium.


Here's the back of the card.