15 Mar 2010: ships and boats
The city of Ito is located about halfway down the east coast of Japan's Izu Peninsula, now part of Shizuoka Prefecture. It is the place where William Adams, an English navigator who arrived in Japan from the Netherlands after nineteen months at sea, built the first western-style warship in 1604. Adams' story was the basis for James Clavell's novel "Shogun".
Although all of the big ships now make port a hundred kilometers further north at Yokohama, Ito is still one of the larger port cities on the Izu Peninsula, and its harbor supports a small fleet of commercial fishing vessels.
Ito is close to the Pacific approaches to the large naval base at Yokosuka. It is also where the Kuroshio Current [Japan's equivalent of the Gulf Stream in that it carries warm tropical water northward towards the pole] approaches Japan's main island of Honshu. And the whole Izu Peninsula sits on a major plate tectonic boundary, the Izu - Bonin - Mariana Arc, where the Pacific plate is subducted under the Philippine plate, forming the deepest gash in the surface of the Earth - the eleven-thousand meter [almost SEVEN MILES!] deep subsea canyon called the Mariana Trench.
So, Ito gets its fair share of visits from oceanic and geologic research vessels, military ships, and commercial and private boats. Here are photos of a few of the more interesting ones.