After finishing the Himi tenmasen model, I was at somewhat of a crossroads. Though the Woody Joe kitamaebune kit is close to being completed and waiting for me to make a set of sails for it, I felt that I needed to start some kind of scratch project.

I considered some other boats from Toyama prefecture, now that I have access to drawings of many examples, but there’s always been one type of boat that has intrigued me for quite some time. The boat is a large cargo transport that operated on the larger rivers in and out of old Edo. There were various kinds of transports on the rivers around Edo, but these stood out to me.

These boats were called takasebune (tah-kah-say-boo-nay), and the term can be a little confusing, as the same term would refer to any boats on the Takase river. But, the term was more commonly applied to various types of cargo boats used on rivers through Japan. My interest here is specifically for those that plied the waters of the Tone (toh-nay) river system.

Illustration of a large Takasebune from the Funakagami

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