Steve and Cathy's Blog

We are heading southeast from Dalian, China and will travel 628 miles to reach Nagasaki, Japan.  As our destination is “The Land of the Rising Sun,” we thought it appropriate to lead with the photo of today’s sunrise at 5:40am.  Our goal is to reach Nagasaki by 8:00am tomorrow. King Neptune may have other ideas, because by 8:00am the sea is roiling. We are on Day 96 of our 180-day journey, and we have really been lucky with regard to the weather, especially at sea. Today is the roughest yet, and we are heading right into the waves. Now it isn’t any big deal, and it could be way worse, but it isn’t a day to spend in Horizons or Insignia Lounge as both of these venues are in the bow, which is where you feel the pitching of the ship the most.

Plus the pitching and rolling of the ship is yet another of Steve and Cathy’s growing list of excuses to do nothing. We listen to another excellent lecture by Peter Croyle on the television in our room. This one is Part 2 As we are of his series on Japan. The lectures are really whetting our appetite to see all we can in the four ports in which we will spend time in Japan: Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Kobe and Kagoshima.   The first task is to learn the geography of the country, something we have never, ever thought to do as residents of 12,000-mile-away Connecticut.

So this being a day where not much is happening, this post will do as we are doing on the ship: introduce us all to the country of Japan, one of the staunchest allies of the United States, and a country we like to think shares many of our values and political beliefs.

We start by, once again, shamelessly post paragraphs of information from Wikipedia (Unfortunately, the links won’t work):

“The kanji that make up Japan’s name mean “sun origin”, and it is often called the “Land of the Rising Sun”. Japan is a stratovolcanic archipelago consisting of about 6,852 islands. The four largest are Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku, which make up about ninety-seven percent of Japan’s land area and often are referred to as home islands. The country is divided into 47 prefectures in eight regions, with Hokkaido being the northernmost prefecture and Okinawa being the southernmost one. The population of 127 million is the world’s tenth largest. Japanese people make up 98.5% of Japan’s total population. About 9.1 million people live in Tokyo, the capital of Japan.

“From the 12th century until 1868, Japan was ruled by successive feudal military shōguns who ruled in the name of the Emperor. Japan entered into a long period of isolation in the early 17th century, which was ended in 1853 when a United States fleet pressured Japan to open to the West. After nearly two decades of internal conflict and insurrection, the Imperial Court regained its political power in 1868 through the help of several clans from Chōshū and Satsuma—and the Empire of Japan was established. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, victories in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War and World War I allowed Japan to expand its empire during a period of increasing militarism. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese surrender. Since adopting its revised constitution on May 3, 1947, during the occupation by the SCAP, Japan has maintained a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy with an Emperor and an elected legislature called the National Diet.”

The geography and topography of any country greatly influences the people that live there, and this is especially true of Japan, which is why we continue to quote Wikipedia:   “Japan has a total of 6,852 islands extending along the Pacific coast of East Asia. The country, including all of the islands it controls, lies between latitudes 24° and 46°N, and longitudes 122° and 146°E. The main islands, from north to south, are Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu. The Ryukyu Islands, which include Okinawa, are a chain to the south of Kyushu. Together they are often known as the Japanese archipelago.

“About 73 percent of Japan is forested, mountainous and unsuitable for agricultural, industrial or residential use.  As a result, the habitable zones, mainly located in coastal areas, have extremely high population densities. Japan is one of the most densely populated countries in the world.

‘The islands of Japan are located in a volcanic zone on the Pacific Ring of Fire. They are primarily the result of large oceanic movements occurring over hundreds of millions of years from the mid-Silurian to the Pleistocene as a result of the subduction of the Philippine Sea Plate beneath the continental Amurian Plate and Okinawa Plate to the south, and subduction of the Pacific Plate under the Okhotsk Plate to the north. The Boso Triple Junction off the coast of Japan is a triple junction where the North American Plate, the Pacific Plate and the Philippine Sea Plate meets. Japan was originally attached to the eastern coast of the Eurasian continent. The subducting plates pulled Japan eastward, opening the Sea of Japan around 15 million years ago.

“Japan has 108 active volcanoes. During the twentieth century several new volcanoes emerged, including Shōwa-shinzan on Hokkaido and Myōjin-shōoff the Bayonnaise Rocks in the Pacific. Destructive earthquakes, often resulting in tsunami, occur several times each century.  The 1923 Tokyo earthquake killed over 140,000 people.  More recent major quakes are the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, a 9.1-magnitude quake which hit Japan on March 11, 2011, and triggered a large tsunami. Japan is substantially prone to earthquakes, tsunami and volcanoes due to its location along the Pacific Ring of Fire. It has the 15th highest natural disaster risk as measured in the 2013 World Risk Index.”

Okay, just one more quotation from Wikipedia, this one about Japan’s economy:

“Japan is the third largest national economy in the world, after the United States and China, in terms of nominal GDP, and the fourth largest national economy in the world, after the United States, China and India, in terms of purchasing power parity.  The service sector accounts for three quarters of the gross domestic product.

Japan has a large industrial capacity, and is home to some of the largest and most technologically advanced producers of motor vehicles, electronics, machine tools, steel and nonferrous metals, ships, chemical substances, textiles, and processed foods. Agricultural businesses in Japan cultivate 13 percent of Japan’s land, and Japan accounts for nearly 15 percent of the global fish catch, second only to China.  As of 2016, Japan’s labor force consisted of some 65.9 million workers.  Japan has a low unemployment rate of around four percent. Some 20 million people, around 17 per cent of the population, were below the poverty line in 2007. ^“

Now this is the first Sea Day post where I have gone into such detail about a place we are about to visit. As will be noted on the blog website, this post is being written days after our visit to Japan. Our inclusion of so much introductory information is a dead giveaway as to our experience there. We look forward to writing about each day and what we observed, experienced and learned about this nation and its people.