R/V なつしま

I spent this past week on the R/V Natsushima (Japanese for Summer Island) as a helper for my professor's research on the Kuroshio, the Gulf Stream of the Pacific. It's a big ship (65 m length) with a professional crew who for the most part did the heavy work, so the researchers like me just downloaded data and set up instruments for the most part. The weather during the week was generally calm, except for one day of moderate (a few meters) waves generated by a ridge of high pressure trailing off from a typhoon way to the south.

Since I'm a vegetarian and this is a Japanese ship, I thought I'd be eating nothing but rice and soy sauce sauce for the week, but the cooks on board were amazing, and made fabulous vegetarian food every meal specially for me and another veggie Brit who took part in the cruise. They even baked fresh bread for us every morning!

A few consistent differences stood out between this Japanese ship and the American research ships I've sailed on. Foremost is the character of the crew. American ships tend to have educated, polite officers but redneck, rough and tumble, ex-convict crewmembers. Contrarily, on this Japanese ship, everyone, both officers and crew, were curteous, helpful, and took pride in their work. This equality in character between officers and crew is pervasive in all of Japan, not just on ships. Society here is not as stratified as it is in the US. Here in Japan, folks tend to take pride in their work regardless of the type of job that they do, and fulltime workers are paid a decent wage regarless of the type of job they do. The huge income disparity that plagues the US is much narrower here. The resulting lack of crime and poverty is a boon to this society, and it's great to see people of all ranks taking pride in their work.

The other big difference between this Japanese ship and its American counterparts is the allowance of alcohol for folks who are off-duty. American ships are entirely dry, while the researchers on the Natsushima drank everytime their shifts were over. Even the officers and crew drank on special occasions. As soon as the ship left port a week and a half ago, the officers held a prayer session on the bridge, where they said a prayer for safety to the Shinto god of the sea or god of safe travels (I could not understand which, or maybe they are the same), to whom a small shrine was built in a cove on the ship's bridge. After the prayer, the attending officers and crew celebrated with small amounts of sake. At the end of the voyage, about the time we returned to port, the officers and crew held an end-of-cruise celebration in the mess hall, where they and the researchers all (except me, the only dry member of the cruise) consumed copious amounts of beer, sake, chuhai, umeshu, and other types of alcohol that I do not know. Regardless of this inebriation, maritime accidents in Japan are rare or nonexistant, and Japan's maritime safety record appears better than the safety record of American ships. Maybe this again is related to the pride and equality present among all levels of officers and crew, and the economic equality that pervades society in general.