Hatte Yamashita

This sailor’s name makes no secret of his Asian heritage, with records confirming he was born in Nagasaki, Japan. Perhaps his first name was incorrectly translated or anglicized from the original Japanese. His shipmates might have called him “Hatty” and they probably didn’t pronounce the last name correctly with the accent on the second syllable.

The exact date and place of Hatte’s arrival in America is unknown but his enlistment was at League Island, home of the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The earliest record is dated February 9, 1891, stating he was transferred from another ship where he spent the previous four months as a cook. That places his age at 15 when he first signed up.

His new ship was, in fact, a brand new ship, the cruiser USS Newark (C-1), shown here. The Navy described it as the first modern cruiser in the U.S. fleet. It had just been commissioned a week before Hatte came on board, and was built by William Cramp & Sons Shipbuilding Company of Philadelphia.

Within seven years, Hatte’s rating was changed to Cabin Steward while serving on the USS New York (ACR-2). Built two years after the Newark, this was the Navy’s first armored cruiser put into service and the flagship of Rear Admiral William Thomas Sampson. 

Its sister ship, the USS Maine, sank on February 15, 1898 in Havana harbor during the Cuban war of Independence. Whether the explosion was internal or external is still debated, but American newspapers  fanned the flames for U.S. involvement (“Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!”).

New York was the first to arrive after the declaration of war in April, and fired the first shot in the first action of the war on April 25th against the city of Matanzas. The entire Spanish fleet was destroyed by July and New York returned home to a victor’s welcome in August. 

Hatte probably stayed with the ship when it became the flagship of the Asiatic Fleet. From 1905-1909 it was decommissioned and modernized at Boston. Records show that Hatte may have been married around this time, but then caught tuberculosis. He was at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital when he died in early 1910.

His body was interred here in the Naval Plot with a military marker. Decades later, relatives or descendants must have asked to have the body moved. On July 22, 1952, his remains were exhumed, cremated and shipped home to Nagasaki, as confirmed by naval and cemetery records.

Whether as standard procedure or by mistake, his marker was reset in its original location, which makes it a “cenotaph,” marking the death of  someone who is actually buried somewhere else. It also became so weather-beaten it was almost impossible to read.

Responsibility for 148 of the 164 National Cemeteries falls under the National Cemetery Administration of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The ten-acre Naval Plot at Mount Moriah is the only “Naval Cemetery” overseen by the VA-NCA. Unfortunately, all those stones of white marble do not always get the attention they deserve. 

Starting in 2011 and over the next five years, the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery and volunteers from local colleges worked to identify over 700 grave markers that were either illegible, marked as unknown, left unmarked, or misidentified. Applications were then made to the NCA to have each of them replaced. 

That’s what took place here in 2020 (as shown at the top of this page) so that Cabin Steward Yamashita’s life of service on behalf of our country will not be forgotten.