Lanterns Floated on River to Commemorate 1985 JAL Plane Crash, Mourn Victims; 520 Died in Accident

The Yomiuri Shimbun

14:22 JST, August 12, 2025

Lanterns for the repose of souls were floated Monday on the river flowing at the foot of a ridge of Mt. Osutaka in Gunma Prefecture where 520 people died due to the Japan Airlines passenger plane crash.

On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the crash, about 200 lanterns inscribed with messages to the victims reading, “Watch over us” or “We’re all doing well,” were placed on the Kanna River at 6:56 p.m., the time the accident occurred. Lights were arranged to form the numbers “8” and “12” along the riverbank.

Actress Hitomi Kuroki participated the event for the first time to honor her late Takarazuka Revue classmate Yumiko Yoshida, then 24. Kuroki said she had been unable to come to the site because she could not accept Yoshida’s death, but she decided to visit on the 40th anniversary.

“I finally made it,” Kuroki said, wiping away tears as she floated a lantern on the river. “I’m sorry it took so long. I didn’t have the courage to come.”

A librarian from Yamato, Kanagawa Prefecture, lost her father.

“We’re all trying our best to live together as a family,” the woman, 60, said about her father in her first visit in two years. She released a lantern while thinking of her father, who died at 50, watching over his family from above.

She said her father had to be away from home for work a lot, but he was a kind man who would listen to his family chatting with a smile on his face.

“This is where my father is,” she said. “Coming here has meaning.”

A company employee in Ashiya, Hyogo Prefecture, lost his father, then 29, about six months before he was born. The man 39, wrote on the lantern, “I’m almost 40 now,” and “Watch over me.”

Three years ago, the man became a father to a baby girl.

“I have begun thinking more cheerfully about my father than before, wondering whether he would have quit smoking if he was still alive or switched from beer to nonalcoholic beer,” the man said, adding that he could notice that the families of the victims have been aging.

“It is our mission to pass on the story to generations who do not know about the accident,” he said. Addressing Japan Airlines, he said, “After 40 years, please take this as a fresh start and ensure that such accidents never happen again.”