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.

The technological revolution in shipbuilding in the early twentieth century had a great impact on the military, industrial, commercial worlds. Matsumoto focuses on the relationship between this revolution and the structure and function of 'technology gatekeepers' during the transfer of marine science and technology from Britain to Japan.

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.

Fourteen volumes which work together to define what is distinctive about Japan's economic and industrial history. Subjects range from the influence of Confucianism on Japanese economic policy, via Japanese management philosophy, to the challenge of Europe and the consequences of investment in some of the U K's poorest former industrial areas.

Cover; Contents; 1. Introduction / Marcel van der Linden, Hugh Murphy, and Raquel Varela; North-western Europe; 2. Labour in the British shipbuilding and ship repairing industries in the twentieth century / Hugh Murphy; 3. Bremer Vulkan: A case study of the West German shipbuilding industry and its narratives in the second half of the twentieth century / Johanna Wolf; 4. From boom to bust: Kockums, Malmö (Sweden), 1950-1986 / Tobias Karlsson.

This book compiles seven essays concerning changes to merchant shipping over the hundred and fifty years between 1850 and 2000, and spanning a range of countries, with particular focus on Norway, Greece, Japan, and England. The essays are linked by the theme of change: from traditional to modern shipping; in fluctuating cargo demands; from sail to steam; wood to iron; in improvements in communication technologies; in political natures and affiliations; in seafaring skillsets; in the advent of containerisation and advent of globalisation. The overall aim is to construct a solid international context for the merchant shipping industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - primarily to aid a major Norwegian deep-sea merchant marine project. The book contains an introduction that sets out these aims, and seven essays by maritime historians which form part of the international contextual whole, though all can be approached individually.

This work examines how the navies of Great Britain, the USA, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, France and Italy confronted the various technological changes posed during different periods in the 20th century.