This is the story of the author's apprenticeships with Japanese masters to build five unique and endangered traditional boats. It is part ethnography, part instruction, and part the personal story of a wooden boatbuilder fueled by a passion to preserve a craft tradition on the brink of extinction. Over the course of 17 trips to Japan, Douglas Brooks traveled over 30,000 miles to seek out and interview Japan's elderly master boatbuilders; he built boats with five of them, all in their seventies and eighties, between 1996 and 2010. For most of them, Brooks was their sole and last apprentice. Part I introduces significant aspects of traditional Japanese boatbuilding: design, workshop and tools, wood and materials, joinery and fastenings, propulsion, ceremonies, and the apprenticeship system. Part II details each of his five apprenticeships, concluding with a poignant chapter on Japan's sole remaining traditional shipwright. This fascinating book fills a large and long-standing gap in the literature on Japanese crafts, and will be of interest to boatbuilders, woodworkers, and all those impressed with the marvels of Japanese design and workmanship.

Britain’s foremost scholar of the international shipping industry, based at the Centre for Port and Maritime History, University of Liverpool, here examines the growth and development of Japan’s modern shipping and shipbuilding industries across a wide range of topics, through the pre-war, Pacific War and post-war periods, to the transfer of shipping technology, the role of bulk carriers and world trade and the organization and structure of the Japanese merchant navy. Prompted originally by his research into the decline of the British industries in a global context, his focus inevitably turned to Japan which in the post-war years had replaced Britain as the world’s largest ship operators and ship owners and remains so today.

Making extensive use of Japanese and U.S. sources, including wartime intelligence reports from the National Defense Archives in Tokyo and recently declassified U.S. documents, this book examines the reasons for Japan's failure to protect its merchant fleet.