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WHEN LIEUTENANT Shirase suggested going to the South Pole, everyone in Japan thought he was mad. Only a few decades earlier, simply leaving the country had been forbidden on pain of death. In a nation with no tradition of polar exploration, Shirase struggled to find anyone to back the venture. But he was persistent and eventually found a man who shared his enthusiasm: Count Okuma, a prominent nobleman and a former prime minister.

Okuma gave Shirase enough money to buy and equip a ship—just. He bought a three-masted wooden schooner 30 metres long, a third the size of Scott’s Terra Nova. The Kainan Maru was reinforced with iron panels and fitted with a small engine to help it plough a path through the ice. And when everything was ready, Okuma presented Shirase with a marvellous sword forged in 1600. The ship set sail in December 1910.

The Japanese Antarctic Expedition ran straight into terrible weather. Battered and buffeted, the little ship arrived in New Zealand in February 1911 to take on supplies. The hostility was palpable. The local press sneered loudly. The ship was too small. The 27 men were badly equipped and they had no experience. They were taking dogs when Scott had ponies and their sledges were like toys. “The equipment does not seem such as a Scott or a Shackleton would select for a dash to the Pole,” sniffed one paper.

And how could the men possibly reach the pole on a diet of rice, pickled plums and dried cuttlefish? Even their clothes were wrong. “The commander, in his smart khaki uniform and cloak, with blue facings, a highly decorated sword and a pair of spurs, did not look ready for the hardships of the Antarctic,” reported The Lyttelton Times, although it admitted this “might not necessarily” be his Antarctic outfit.

Douglas Mawson, an Australian who had been on Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition, suggested that the team wasn’t interested in the pole but was eyeing up Antarctica’s vast colonies of seals “with a view to establishing an industry in oil and skin”. And if they were entering the race to the south then they were “contravening the laws of etiquette” by trying to steal Scott’s thunder.

One criticism was justified. Everyone agreed that Shirase had left it too late in the season to land men in Antarctica and set up a base for a push to the pole. Undaunted, he set sail from Wellington on 11 February.

The Kainan Maru was soon fighting its way through the worst seas anyone aboard had ever seen. When the weather finally calmed, the sailors saw their first penguins, and then their first icebergs. But as they drew near to land, the ice began to close in at alarming speed. The expedition wouldn’t have survived a winter locked in the ice. Disappointed, they turned back.

On 2 May, the Kainan Maru sailed into Sydney Harbour. Shirase hoped to spend the winter there while his men repaired the ship and he stocked up ready for another trip south. If he expected even a hint of a hero’s welcome, he was in for a shock.

Anti-Japanese feelings were running high in Australia. “We found ourselves, in some quarters, subject to a degree of suspicion,” he wrote later. This was something of an understatement. The men were allowed to camp in a place called Parsley Bay. There they built the wooden hut that was to have been their base camp in Antarctica and got by on meagre rations of rice and pickles. Parsley Bay was close to the military forts guarding the entrance to Sydney harbour. Rumours began to spread that the ship was on a clandestine mission. According to one reporter the forts had posted extra sentries at night and cancelled all leave.

Not everyone was so suspicious. Tannatt Edgeworth David, a geology professor at the University of Sydney, had been on Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition two years earlier. He pointed out that the expedition was far from amateur and that Shirase and his little ship had done well to get as far as they did so late in the season. His intervention worked miracles. The press stopped hounding the men, and the authorities became more helpful. The Kainan Maru was fixed, supplies loaded and it set sail again on 19 November 1911. Before he left, Shirase presented David with his sword.

Shirase knew that by then both Amundsen and Scott would have begun their bid to reach the pole. Amundsen had set out on 19 October and Scott five days later. So the Japanese decided to concentrate on exploring some untouched parts of the continent.

The ship crossed the Antarctic Circle just before Christmas and struggled through the ice towards the Ross Sea. When the Japanese reached the Bay of Whales in January, they found Amundsen’s ship Fram waiting to pick him up on his return from the pole. The Fram’s officers were horrified by the tiny boat but impressed by the men who had dared to sail her into such waters.

A few days later Shirase and six of his men trekked across a plain of sea ice and struggled to the top of the Ross ice barrier, a wall of ice 100 metres high. From the top they prepared to race south—to see how far they could get with dog sledges. They set off the day Scott began his return from the pole, and ran into the same storms. It took eight days to travel 250 kilometres. They turned back—and covered the same distance in a record-breaking three days.

Meanwhile, the Kainan Maru headed to Edward VII Peninsula. Scott had discovered this land in 1902, but the weather had been too rough to land men. The Japanese succeeded and explored the territory. On 3 February, the ship returned to pick up Shirase and his team. By June the expedition was back in Yokohama. When they left Japan they were madmen. When they returned they were heroes.