© 2024 Hawaiʻi Public Radio
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Talk Shows:Listen again to your favorite talk programs on HPR-2!Local News:News features and series from HPR's award winning news departmentHPR-2 Program Schedule:find out when all your favorite programs are on the air on HPR-2! Or you can find out more from the HPR-2 detailed program listings.

Bronze Bell Recovered from World War II Aircraft-Carrying Submarine

HURL/ University of Hawaii.
HURL/ University of Hawaii.
T. Kerby, HURL/UH.
Credit T. Kerby, HURL/UH.
Illustration showing relative location of the I-400 and its bronze bell.

Scientists with UH’s School of Ocean, Earth Science and Technology have recovered the bell from a Japanese WW2 submarine sunk off of O‘ahu.

The i-400 “Sen-Toku” class submarine was considered one of Japan’s secret weapons.  With a length longer than a football field, it carried three attack planes concealed inside a small hanger on its deck.  Planes were outfitted with a single bomb and were able to attack targets of interest with little to no warning.  The subs never actually were used in combat, and were captured by U.S. forces following Japan’s surrender.

To keep the technology from Soviet hands- the sub was torpedoed and sunk off of Barbers Point during the cold war.  

Researchers discovered the vessel in five-hundred-meters, and have since carried out a series of missions to map the wreck and nearby debris field.  Terry Kerby is the operations director of the Hawai‘i Undersea Research Laboratory.

After a year-long stabilization process the bronze bell will join binoculars and other artifacts from the Japanese submarine at the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum

Nick Yee’s passion for music developed at an early age, as he collected jazz and rock records pulled from dusty locations while growing up in both Southern California and Honolulu. In college he started DJing around Honolulu, playing Jazz and Bossa Nova sets at various lounges and clubs under the name dj mr.nick. He started to incorporate Downtempo, House and Breaks into his sets as his popularity grew, eventually getting DJ residences at different Chinatown locations. To this day, he is a fixture in the Honolulu underground club scene, where his live sets are famous for being able to link musical and cultural boundaries, starting mellow and building the audience into a frenzy while steering free of mainstream clichés.
Related Stories