"[4] Principal ports-of-call included Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kobe, Yokohama, Honolulu, Los Angeles & San Francisco.

[6] During a subsequent crossing, upon arrival in San Francisco on 14 December 1930, US Customs agents seized a large amount of opium during festivities marking the ship's first anniversary of Trans-Pacific service.

While at Los Angeles, Baron Takeichi Nishi, the gold medalist, entertained his friends, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.

[9] During a voyage departing from San Francisco on 1 April 1937, Asama Maru carried Helen Keller with a message of good will from President Franklin D.

On 21 January, she was intercepted in international waters 35 miles (56 km) from Nozaki Lighthouse, at the southern tip of the Bōsō Peninsula by the Royal Navy light cruiser HMS Liverpool.

The British had received intelligence that crewmen from the scuttled German liner Columbus who had escaped to the United States had taken passage on Asama Maru in an attempt to return to Germany.

An armed boarding party removed 21 of the ship's passengers, all former officers or technicians of Standard Oil tankers, claiming that they were German military personnel[13] The Government of Japan formally protested the action, on the basis of Article 47, of the 1909 London Declaration, which states that only persons actually enlisted in the armed services of belligerent nations could be removed from the ships of neutral countries.

During this voyage, 14 crewmen (six officers and eight sailors) of the Columbus, travelling in disguise as American students were on board, and reached Yokohama on 12 November.

She departed Yokohama on 25 June with US Ambassador Joseph Grew and 430 other American diplomats, along with members of the Spanish embassy in Japan.

On reaching Hong Kong on 29 June, she embarked an additional 377 Americans, Canadians and other Allied nationals who had been held for 44 months at the Stanley Internment Camp.

These were exchanged for 1500 Japanese and Siamese diplomats (including Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura and Saburō Kurusu), businessmen and journalists in the United States and Brazil at the time of the outbreak of war, who had been transported to this location on the MS Gripsholm.

Asama Maru was placed back in served as a troopship and transport, shuttling men and supplies from Japan to various points in Southeast Asia.

She narrowly escaped four torpedoes fired at her by USS Sunfish on 10 March off of Takao (now Kaohsiung), but was alerted in time by her hydrophone operator and was able to take evasive action.

[9] In October 1944, Asama Maru was one of the ships in a major convoy transporting elements of the Imperial Japanese Army’s 1st Division from China to the Philippines.