Hosono’s story attracted little attention at first. He went to the offices of Mitsui in New York to ask friends for help to get him home. From there he travelled to San Francisco to find a ship back to Japan. A local newspaper heard of his story and dubbed him the “Lucky Japanese Boy”. Back in Tokyo, he was interviewed by a number of magazines and newspapers including the daily Yomiuri Shimbun, which ran a photograph of him with his family.
However, Hosono soon found himself the target of public condemnation. He was described as a “stowaway” aboard lifeboat 10 by Archibald Gracie, who wrote a best-selling account of the disaster, while the seaman in charge of the boat, Able Seaman Edward Buley, told a US Senate inquiry that Hosono and the other man must have disguised themselves as women in order to sneak aboard.
He lost his job and was condemned as a coward by the Japanese press. School textbooks described him as an example of how to be dishonourable and he was denounced as immoral by a professor of ethics. Nonetheless he was soon re-employed by the ministry, as he was too valuable to lose, and continued to work for it until 1939.
Various explanations have been put forward for why he encountered such a hostile reaction. It has been said that he was seen to have “betray[ed] the Samurai spirit of self-sacrifice”. Another suggestion, from Jon P. Alston and Isao Takei, is that he was seen as having failed to show the expected conformity and was believed to have selfishly pushed aside other passengers to board the lifeboat. As a result he was subjected to mura hachibu or ostracism. Margaret D. Mehl attributes his ostracism to the perception that he had embarrassed Japan; notably, an ethics textbook criticised him for having disgraced the Japanese through his conduct. The “women and children first” protocol was not part of the Samurai code, but had instead come to Japan via the 1859 book Self Help by Samuel Smiles, which was a huge success in translation and proved enormously influential in introducing Western values to Japan. Mehl comments: “Hosono’s failure to act as the Anglo-Saxon nations evidently expected their men to act caused embarrassment in Japan, but more because of the Japanese’s acceptance of Western values than because of their own traditions.”
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