1985
The last plane out of Tehran
In March 1985 a Turkish Airlines DC-10 flew into a city under a shoot-down warning to collect 215 Japanese civilians. Whether it was about 1890 is a better question than it looks.
In March 1985, in the middle of the Iran–Iraq war, Iraq announced that after a fixed deadline it would attack Tehran and fire on any aircraft in Iranian airspace without discrimination. Accounts differ on the window — some say seventy-two hours, some say forty-eight — but the effect was the same. Every country with citizens in Iran started pulling them out, and commercial seats evaporated.
Roughly 215 Japanese nationals could not get out. Most were engineers and technical staff, many connected to Nissan's operation in Tehran, some with families. Japan Airlines would not fly without safe-passage assurances from both Tehran and Baghdad and did not receive them. So the Japanese were at the airport with no aircraft coming for them and a clock running.
Two ambassadors
The Japanese ambassador in Tehran, Yutaka Nomura, went to a friend: İsmet Birsel, the Turkish ambassador. Birsel took it up the line. Turgut Özal — then prime minister, and a man with his own long-standing interest in Japan — approved it.
Turkish Airlines put out a call for volunteer crew and got one. A DC-10 flew into Tehran on 19 March 1985, loaded the Japanese, and left. By the most commonly repeated account it cleared Iranian airspace roughly three hours before the bombardment began. The 215 were flown to Istanbul. Turkey's own citizens in Iran largely went out overland, by road, which was slower and less dramatic and which is a detail worth keeping in view.
The aftermath was substantial: Özal visited Japan that May; Prince and Princess Mikasa came to Turkey in June 1986; a Japan–Turkey inter-parliamentary friendship group was founded in 1985; sister-city agreements followed. In 2015 Turkish Airlines painted a plane Kushimoto, put cabin crew from the 1985 flight back in their original uniforms, and landed it at Narita, where Junichi Numata — one of the evacuees, formerly of Nissan — was waiting on the tarmac.
Was it about Ertuğrul?
The story as it is usually told: Turkey remembered that Japanese villagers saved Turkish sailors in 1890, and ninety-five years later repaid the debt. It is taught in Turkish primary schools. It is the spine of the 2015 film. It is, as a piece of national memory, entirely real.
As an account of the decision, it is thinner than it sounds.
What the documentation actually shows is a chain of specific people: a Japanese ambassador who had a personal friendship with his Turkish counterpart, a Turkish ambassador willing to spend capital, and a prime minister with existing Japanese economic ties and a taste for the grand gesture. Nobody has produced a cable in which Özal cites 1890 as his reason. The Ertuğrul framing was applied to the event, powerfully and quickly, and it may well have been in the room — but "it was in the culture" and "it was the cause" are different claims, and the popular version collapses them.
Even the numbers drift in the retelling. The documented figure is 215; the film says more than three hundred; some accounts put over four hundred Japanese in Tehran overall.
None of this diminishes what the crew did. Volunteering to fly a wide-body into a city under an explicit shoot-down warning is the same act whatever the reason. It is only that the debt-repaid version is a story about the flight, and it did most of its work afterwards — which is, in fairness, what the Ertuğrul story has been doing since 1890.