Rotorua - a promised friendship between two brave people

Before I visited Rotorua for the HINZ 2013 conference, in the Te Reo Māori (Māori or indegenious language of New Zealand) course at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, I studied and presented about Rotorua and Kahumatamomoe, the ancient Māori explorer after whom the lake was named. In the study, I found an old news article of the New Zealand Herald on 12 July 1916, titled "Japanese and Maoris - Brave Races Fraternise" which reported that Māori people welcomed Japanese sailors.

After the Japanese Navy escorted the ANZAC convoys to the European theatre during the World War I, it had been a tradition of the Japanese Navy to visit Rotorua when Japanese training ships visited New Zealand until the menace of war engulfed the whole world again in the late 1930's.

What made this significant for me was that my grandfather served in the Japanese Navy during the period when the Pacific Ocean meant what its name suggested. Thus there is some chance that my grandfather visited the geothermal city long before me, as he once told me that he had crossed the equator in a voyage.

He did not serve in the fleet during the war. I heard that he worked at shipyards building and repairing warships but he did not talk much about the wartime. He was not a warlike man. Whether he had visited or not, he must have heard about Rotorua and hospitality of the people there. He must have been pleased to know that I could return some gratitude to them in my tauparapara or the opening of my presentation at the conference there.