I was digging around on Youtube a few weeks ago and discovered an interesting 3D walk-around video of a traditional Japanese boat. In the description, I found a link to a Japanese website called Wasen Zufu (和船図譜) or Illustration of Historical Japanese Ships. This is apparently a blog site of someone in Japan who has created some virtual 3D models of a few wasen. Some of these are shown as a textured image, with a couple shown in walk-around video clips of them.
Many people might not take much notice, but I saw that a couple of these reminded me of boats I had seen in a book on boats of Toyama prefecture. Looking more closely, sure enough, three of the boats from Toyama are included.
3D digital models are interesting, as you should then be able to view then from any angle, and thus get a better sense of what they look like. I suppose they’re really no different from physical models, though these digital models lack some details, such as planking and fastening. But, on a small enough scale, my own wooden models may lack some of these features. So, that does cause me to rethink those smaller models of mine.
But in any case, the site, as I say, is interesting. One of the most interesting things to me, was to discover a link to the text of a talk given by Mr. Naoki Hirose, the curator of the Himi City Museum, and someone I actually know. I already wrote about the details about this in a previous post here: Funabashi – Boat Bridges in the Edo Period (船橋).
Anyway, you can check out the site here: https://blog.canpan.info/wasenn-zufu/
I’ve written to the owner of the site and he indicated he was going to keep making illustrations. So, while the site doesn’t seem to have been updated in a while, perhaps we’ll seem some new information there in the future. Ω
Wasen Mokei 和船模型 