The Submarine Warship

A traveler leaving Naples for Japan accompanies a young boy and his mother aboard a richly laden steamer. A nurse’s strange warnings, a shattered lamp, and a mysterious ship precede a catastrophe in the Indian Ocean.

Cast adrift, the survivors reach an island where a Japanese naval captain and his sailors are secretly building an extraordinary submarine. Their new life brings friendship, baseball, fierce animals, an iron expedition car, and a perilous rescue by balloon. Another disaster threatens the invention before it can reach home.

Published in 1900, Oshikawa Shunrō’s adventure combines maritime mystery, exuberant machinery, comic contests, and an openly imperial vision of Japan’s future. Its imagined technologies belong to the early history of Japanese speculative adventure.