1892–1905
The tea master's subscription
Yamada Torajirō raised money for the widows of Ertuğrul, carried it to Istanbul himself, and then stayed. The legend around him has since outgrown the record.
The news of the wreck produced something in Japan that nobody organised from above: a nationwide collection for the families of the dead. Among the people who made it happen was Yamada Torajirō — born 1866, a tea master and businessman, not a diplomat, holding no office at all.
He ran public fundraising meetings for the Turkish warship, and the campaign brought in over five thousand yen. That was real money in Meiji Japan. What distinguishes Yamada is what he did next: rather than wire it or hand it to an intermediary, he took it. He left Yokohama bay in January 1892 carrying the donation money and arrived in Istanbul on 4 April 1892 with the second portion of it.
Then he stayed for thirteen years.
The shop on Pera Street
Japan and the Ottoman Empire had no diplomatic relations, which meant that Japanese subjects in Istanbul had no legal status whatsoever. Yamada got permission to trade anyway. He worked the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce, became a friend of its general secretary Spirakis Alexandritis, and got himself authorised to operate as a "commercial museum" under an Ottoman law of 1890 — a category that existed for other reasons and that he used as a door.
He sold Japanese silk, porcelain, tea and woodwork from a room in the Chamber before renting a shop on Pera Street. With Kenjirō Nakamura he ran it as Nakamura Shōten, exporting tobacco leaf, rock salt, sheep's wool and cowhide, importing pottery, crafts and silk goods. He taught Japanese to Ottoman naval officers. He served as honorary consul. In 1892 he presented Abdülhamid II with a sword — and the sixteenth-century samurai armour and helmet still displayed at Topkapı came from him.
Later in life he converted to Islam, took the name Abdülhalil, made the hajj, and after 1923 was known as Yamada Sōyū. He went home in 1905 and wrote books about Turkey for the rest of a long life; he died in 1957.
The man who gets left out
Here the honest version has to diverge from the usual one.
Yamada is routinely called the founder of Japanese–Turkish relations, and scholars who have gone back to the primary sources have been pushing against that for years. The record has been shaped by autobiography and by biographers with a story to tell, and the size of Yamada's personal contribution in particular has grown in the retelling. Even the length of his residence wobbles depending on who is counting: the documented run is 1892 to 1905, but you will regularly see "twenty years" and even "twenty-two years" in print.
The clearer casualty of the legend is Shōtarō Noda. Noda was a journalist at Jiji Shinpō who came to Istanbul with the delegation returning the survivors, and when the Japanese ships sailed home the Ottomans asked that someone stay behind to teach Japanese at the Harbiye military academy. Noda accepted. He taught Ottoman officers for two years starting in 1891 — the first Japanese lessons given in Istanbul — and he interpreted for Yamada when Yamada arrived. He was also, before Yamada, among the first Japanese to convert to Islam, taking the name Abdülhalim.
Noda did much of the groundwork and Yamada got the statue. This is not a scandal; it is simply how founding stories work. But a site about 1890 that repeats the legend without the correction is not telling you about 1890 — it is telling you about the legend.