Kushimoto Turkish Memorial Museum

On the night of 16 September 1890 a typhoon drove the Ottoman frigate Ertugrul onto Funagora, a reef off the eastern tip of Kii-Oshima that sailors had feared for centuries. The ship had brought an envoy, Osman Pasha, to Emperor Meiji and was heading home. Japanese officials had urged repairs on the 26-year-old wooden ship before the typhoon season, but it sailed on schedule. Seawater flooded the engines and they exploded. Of 656 aboard, 587 died, Osman Pasha among them. The islanders of Kashino worked without sleep to pull out survivors and the dead, and 69 men lived to be treated in Kobe and taken home on two Japanese warships. Turkey has not forgotten. In 1985, during the Iran-Iraq War, two Turkish planes flew 215 stranded Japanese out of Tehran. The museum itself is modest: a model of the ship, objects recovered from the wreck and photographs, worth half an hour. Outside, a memorial rebuilt on Ataturk's orders and unveiled in 1937 looks down on the reef, and a joint memorial service is held every five years. The path goes on to the Kashinozaki lighthouse, lit in 1870 and Japan's oldest stone lighthouse, designed by Richard Henry Brunton. You cannot go inside, but a spiral stair takes you up for the view, and in winter the slopes fill with daffodils.