Monthly Archives: August 2016

Japan Boat Research Trip 2016 Update

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For those who don’t know anything about this trip and why I’m making it, please check my page: Japan Research Trip under my Japan Trip Blog menu.

Note that I’ve been fundraising for a few months now to try to gather up the resources to make the trip happen. Thanks to very generous friends and family, I’ve been able to fully fund this trip. It’s still going to be a pretty “lean” trip in many ways, and it’s way too short for visiting Japan. But, it’s going to have to do.

Toba Sea Folk Museum

Toba Sea Folk Museum

There may be some obstacles once I’m there as it’s typhoon season and trains may be delayed and that may put a real hamper on some of my plans. But, life is what it is, and I’ll just go  with the flow as best as possible.

My flight leaves out of SFO late Saturday night and, mostly, I’m prepared to go. Passport is in order, accommodations are booked, got a friend to stay with my cat, I’ve gathered the things I need to take, gifts to present to people I’m meeting, etc. I just need to finalize my rail pass, possibly obtain a “Pocket WiFi”, and it might be a good idea to reserve my tickets for the ferry to Sado Island.

The flight and some of the hotel stays were booked months ago through Travelocity. I actually got a tremendous deal on the flight, which is how all of this got started in the first place. Most of the hotels were booked through Booking.com, and together, those two sites seemed to do a decent job of securing my accommodations.

Bridge at the Ise shrine in 2006

Bridge at the Ise shrine in 2006

So, here are the places where I’m going with the major items / points of interest. Asterisk* indicates overnight stay.

  • Shizuoka
    • Visit Woody Joe
    • Hacchoro at port of Yaizu
  • Toba*
    • Toba Seafolk Museum (Warehouse of boats)
    • Ise-jingu Shrine
  • Tokyo*
    • Edo Tokyo Museum
    • Urayasu Boat Museum
    • Visit Wasen Tomo no Kai
    • Dinner with friends from The Rope, Tokyo
  • Ogi village, Sado Island*
    • Ogi Folk Museum
      • Hakusan Maru (Kitamaebune replica ship)
    • Taraibune Excursions / Taraibune maker
  • Tokyo*
    • Final Day of sightseeing, visiting people

 

Google Maps

I have to say that in the last couple weeks, I’ve made very heavy use of Google Maps. Actually, I’ve been using it for months to make sure place I’m staying at are actually in convenient locations. But, the last couple weeks, I’ve been going crazy working out how to get to various places, looking for convenience stores, places to eat on the cheap (most of my money will be tied up in travel and accommodations), etc.

Something that has been invaluable is the “Schedule Explorer”. My first day in Japan is going to be a bit tricky. I land at Haneda around 5:00 am, need to take the airport monorail  to Tokyo Station to get to the JR Office. But, that doesn’t open until until 7:30 am, at which time I need to pick up my Rail Pass (I’m planning on getting a 7-day pass with Green Car access), hop on the Shinkansen toward Nagoya, but get off at Shizuoka Station. There, I will take a cab to Woody Joe, meet my long-time contact Mrs. Yukari Gojo, the president (her father), Mr. Tsuneki, and the staff. Aftewards, Yukari has offered to drive me in her car to the port of Yaizu, where we will meet with Mr. Hiroyuki Kobayashi, who is a member of the group that operates the Hacchoro boats, who will show us the boats and let me examine them.

Shinkansen

Shinkansen to Tohoku in 2008

Afterwards, they will drop me off at Yaizu Station. This station is not on the Shinkansen line, so I have to take this regular train either back to Shizuoka Station or  onward to the next Shinkansen station. Then, I will continue on to Nagoya and switch to another train, possibly one called the Rapid Train Mie (mee-eh), which I can then take all the way south to Toba, where I will stay for a couple nights.

So, all of this is to point out that there’s a lot of travel planning on the first day, and Google Maps seems to have made it very simple for me to figure out how much time I will have in Yaizu. Of course, there will be some glitches and things it can not predict. But, I’m not going to be any better at predicting issues myself.

Also, being able to “walk” around the places has allowed me the opportunity to figure out that my initial accommodations in Ise, while homey and inexpensive, are too hard to find from the train station, especially if I’m running late and don’t get there until after dark. So, I found some alternative places that were actually in Toba and again did a virtual walk around and found the places very easy to get to.

Of course, I haven’t physically been there yet, so I won’t really know how successful this has all been until after I’ve gotten there. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

For now, it’s all pretty well planned out and so I’m setting it all aside and it will be what it will be!

The Wasen Modeler Launch

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I’ve finally decided to bite the bullet and launch my wasenmodeler site. I’ve been posting my work on my shipmodeler blog for a while now, but there have been stretches when I’ve been working a lot on Japanese traditional boats, or Wasen. So, I started a page on my site, Japanese Watercraft.

Since I began my first Japanese wooden boat, my work has matured a lot, and I’m giving a talk together with boatbuilder Douglas Brooks at the 2016 Nautical Research Guild conference in San Diego in October (my segment is on modeling Japanese boats, and it will be very short). In addition, I’ve been scheduled to do one of the roundtable discussions there on modeling Japanese boats. And, now that I’m finally heading to Japan for a week of research and networking, it seems that the time has come to spin off wasenmodeler as a stand-alone blog site.

Woody Joe’s Yakatabune kit

Of course, this is just getting off the ground, so I’m just beginning to build content and create new site pages. Now, visitors who are interested in Japanese boats and their models no longer have to wade through my ship modeler posts about building english sailing ship models in paper, etc.

I do want to point out that this is actually a massive topic. Even though I’ve been building Japanese boat models for a couple years now, I’m only just now scratching the surface. The more I learn, the more I discover how limited my knowledge is. The amount of available information in English is minimal, and it really helps not only to be able to read Japanese, but to actually be in Japan to access information first-hand. I neither read much Japanese (just a few words and can read the phonetic alphabets), or speak much Japanese (better than I read). Nor do I live in Japan.

Cover of the Funakagami

Cover of the Funakagami

But, heavy use of scanning and OCR, the trackpad handwriting recognition technology and Japanese language input system on my Mac, and a good network of helpful friends and associates (ship modelers, maritime experts, Japanese boat builders, and native Japanese speakers) helps to overcome some of these obstacles.

So, please bear with me while I work my way through the subject and building up the content here. In the meantime, make sure to check out these links:

English sites

Japanese sites/links

Funakagami – A PDF Book on Japanese Boat Types

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As I’m preparing for my study trip to Japan in, I’ve been checking on museum websites and such. The Maritime Science Museum is closed, except for a small museum annex, their website still lists the museum publications.

I don’t see any place to actually purchase these, but there are a couple books that you can download as a pdf. The one that immediately caught my interest had a number of Edo period boats on the cover. So, I immediately downloaded it and started looking through it.

Funakagami cover

Funakagami cover

I’m still working to understand the text, but the first part of the book is mostly old illustrations. Apparently, this is taken from a book called a Funekan, which was used by the Bakufu, or Shogunate government, to aid in identifying the many types of small boats on the rivers of the Kanto district, which is the region of old Edo (Tokyo) and its surroundings. The identification was necessary for taxation purposes.

Such a book is a boon to anyone who is trying to learn about different types of Japanese boats. There is little information about the boats themselves, but there is a nice large illustration of each boat type, and an index which classifies the boat. In the back of the book is a section which identifies the names of the parts of each boat. In the end, the text gets very meaty with, as far as I can tell, discussion about taxes, etc.

The book can not be printed as it is a password protected pdf. But, I discovered I can still copy text and take screen shots of the images to compile into my own notes. The copied text can be pasted into Google Translate or similar service. I’ve found that the translation is sometimes not as useful as the pronunciation/romaji spelling that is shown – For those who are familiar with Google Translator, just look under the box on the left, which is where you paste in the original text.

Click here to download the pdf

For me, the book has confirmed things I’ve already learned, taught me a number of new things, allowed me to see things I’d only read about, and raised a number of questions that I will be researching answers to. Ω