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Carol Stack of Alma Michigan recently made a trip to Japan where she discovered two beautiful lighthouses and wrote to tell us about them.
The Daiozaki Lighthouse is in an area long known as dangerous among navigators and many vessels have been wrecked here. There was a saying here "Ship owners are not to find navigators guilty for shipwrecking in the Daio Sea." A request for construction of a lighthouse had been requested since early times.
In 1917 the 3000 ton cruiser Otawa a pride of the Japanese Navy crashed into Daio Rocks and was wrecked. This accident accelerated the move to build a lighthouse. However, the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 collapsed many existing lighthouses and the restoration work took until 1926. Finally on October 5, 1927, the long awaited Daiozaki Lighthouse was lit for the first time and began operation as the first newly built lighthouse after the Great Earthquake.
During WWII the lighthouse was machine gunned by a US carrier based plane and the lens and lantern room were severely damaged, however the lighthouse tower was left relatively unharmed.
The lighthouse was restored in 1978.
This story appeared in the
June 1996 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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