A double-masted, square rigger sailing ship, not unlike those Europeans once used to trade spice, silks and tea in the far east, is scheduled to visit Taiwan's Keelung harbor next month.
Kaisei, a 46m vessel with 15 sails, will be making a circuit from Okinawa, Japan, to Taiwan to China's Fujian Province, but its mission has nothing to do with trade. Instead its purpose is a unique brand of ocean-borne eco-tourism.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF SAIL TRAINING ASSOCIATION
"We're trying to show that some of the concepts of the Industrial Revolution, like that faster and bigger is better -- that maybe they're not so," said Kaoru Ogimi, managing director of the Sail Training Association of Japan, a non-profit organization that runs the ship.
Ogimi compares Kaisei's function to the Outward Bound School, a training organization that takes people out into nature where they work as a group to face challenges and learn about their environment and themselves.
Kaisei, the only ship of its kind that tours throughout Asia, takes its enrollees out to sea.
It carries 45 trainees at a time and it is they who carry out all the ship's tasks, from manning the helm to rigging the sails to peeling potatoes in the galley.
"The first day you don't know how to do anything, but when you get into port you find you're doing everything," said Pan Wei-hwa (
The ship's upcoming East Asia tour will consist of four legs of five to seven days. It begins in Okinawa, Japan on March 4. She will then arrive on March 8 in Miyako, a Japanese island halfway between Okinawa and Taiwan.
She will put into Keelung on March 14, then will head for China's Fujian Province, landing on March 21 after a customs detour to the Japanese island of Yonaguni. The final leg will take her back to Okinawa on March 30.
Participation costs Japanese Yen 10,000 per day, or around NT$2,900, and arrangements can be made locally through the Taiwan Sailing Association (02-2775-7296).
Kaisei was christened in the shipyards of Gadansk, Poland in 1990. Unlike the old ocean traders, she is built of steel and has a motor, as virtually all sailboats now do.
So far she has carried more than 10,000 trainees and the only restriction is an age-limit of 16-and-older.
On her delivery voyage in 1992, she participated in the Grand Regatta Columbus, which recreated the explorer's historic voyage on its 500th-year anniversary.
But out of political sympathy "for the colonized peoples," Ogimi said she was the only vessel to fly the United Nations flag in the event instead of the flag of a former colonial empire.
Similar ideas are expressed in the name chosen for the ship, Kaisei, which translates from the Japanese as "Ocean Planet."
In Asia, Ogimi hopes to foster east Asian friendship. Past voyages have bridged Japan and Korea, a nation Ogimi refers to as "our neighbors and our most distant and hostile enemies, largely because of Japan's attitude towards them."
Now Kaisei will expand its scope of ocean-going goodwill to Taiwan and China. And if everything is successful, it won't be the last time. "Every winter, we hope to come back," Ogimi said.
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