Nobu Shirase

Nobu Shirase (白瀬 矗, Shirase Nobu) (20 July 1861 – 4 September 1946) was a Japanese army officer and explorer. He led the first Japanese Antarctic Expedition, 1910–12, which reached a southern latitude of 80°5′, and made the first landing on the coast of King Edward VII Land.

Shirase had harboured polar ambitions since boyhood. By way of preparation, during his military service he participated in an expedition to the northern Kuril Islands. This venture was poorly organised and ended badly, but nonetheless provided him with useful training for future polar exploration. His longstanding intention was to lead an expedition to the North Pole, but when this mark was claimed by Robert Peary in 1909, Shirase switched his attention to the south.

Unable to attract government support for his Antarctic venture, Shirase raised the finance privately. In its first season, 1910–11, the expedition failed to make a landing, and was forced to winter in Australia. Its second attempt, in 1911–12, was more successful. Although the expedition's achievements were modest, it demonstrated that the Japanese were competent Antarctic travellers, and Shirase returned to Japan in June 1912 to much local acclaim, although the rest of the world showed little interest in his exploits . Even in Japan his fame was short-lived, and Shirase soon found himself faced with a burden of expedition debt that took him most of the rest of his life to redeem. He died in relative poverty in 1946.

Long after Shirase's death, there was belated recognition in Japan of his pioneering endeavours. Several geographical features in Antarctica were named after him or his expedition; the revived Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition named its third and fourth ice-breaking vessels Shirase; his home city of Nikaho erected a statue in 1981, and in 1990 opened a museum dedicated to his memory and the work of his expedition.

Nobu Shirase was born on 13 June 1861, in the Jorenji temple at Konoura (now part of the city of Nikaho in the Akita Prefecture), where his father served as a Buddhist priest. At the time of Shirase's birth, Japan was still largely a closed society, isolated from the rest of the world and ruled by the Tokugawa shogunate which forbade citizens to leave Japan on pain of death. Shirase was seven years old when, following the Boshin civil war of 1868–69, the shogunate was replaced by the Meiji dynasty and the slow process of modernisation began.

Although the concept of geographical exploration was alien in Japan, from an early age Shirase developed a passionate and enduring interest in polar exploration, inspired by the stories he received of the European explorers such as Sir John Franklin and the search for the Northwest Passage. After leaving school in 1879 he began preparation for the priesthood, but this conflicted with his deeper desire to become an explorer. So he left the temple and began training for a career in the Imperial army. In 1881 he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Transport Corps. To prepare himself for future rigours, he adopted a deliberately spartan lifestyle, avoiding drink and tobacco, and forsaking the warmth of the fireside for a regime of hard exercise.

In the course of his military duties, Shirase discussed his ambitions to explore the Arctic with a more senior officer, Kodama Gentarō, who advised him that he should first try exploring the Kuril Islands (known in Japan as the Chishima Islands. These islands form a long archipelago that stretches from Hokkaido in the south to the Russian Kamchatka Peninsula in the north. Ownership of the islands had long been in dispute between Japan and Russia, until the Treaty of St. Petersburg, signed in May 1875, awarded the entire chain to Japan which in return gave up its territorial claims on the island of Sakhalin.

An opportunity arose in 1893, when Shirase was able to join an expedition led by Naritada Gunji to the northern islands in the chain. The aim was to establish a permanent Japanese colony on the northernmost island of Shumshu. The expedition included a diversion to Alaska, on a covert military mission. Poorly organised and ill-equipped, the expedition went badly; during the winter of 1893–94, ten of its members died. Its leader, Gunji, left after a year to fight in the First Sino-Japanese War, leaving Shirase and the survivors to face a second winter, during which several more succumbed to privation and scurvy. They were finally relieved in August 1895. Shirase blamed the disaster on poor organisation and leadership, but nevertheless found the experience of Arctic invaluable for his future plans. For the time being he remained in the army, and fought in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05.