Japanese actually plucked the people out of the water and carried them to safety. We didn’t want to upset the Turks.
When I researched this some time back there were an estimated two million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire on the eve of W.W.I. Reports say over a million were deported in 1915. A large part of those to what is now Syria. Hundreds of thousands were butchered outright. Many others died of starvation, exhaustion, and epidemics which ravaged the concentration camps.