Comment on "Japanese Wooden Boats in Woodblock Prints A Research Project Journal"

Folks:

Graduate student Michelle Damian has posted video clips of her visit with Japanese Shipwright Mr. Kanji Mitsumori as part of her seventh project journal entry. Through the journal Michelle shares her experiences while conducting her MA research on Japanese wooden boats. This includes a variety of activities from studying woodblock prints to travel to Japan. She writes about the importance of woodblock prints, museum exhibits, and intensive study of classical Japanese language texts. You can read her latest entry and view the video clips by clicking on “Research” in the left hand menu of her journal found here:

http://www.uri.edu/artsci/his/mua/project_journals/aj/aj_intro.shtml

We hope you enjoy this inside view of one woman’s academic travels as she seeks to learn about Japanese boat building techniques rarely studied in the west.

Best regards,

T Kurt Knoerl Director The Museum of Underwater Archaeology

Comment sent:

I have enjoyed your journey and postings on such a difficult topic. My grandfather, though he fought in four wars starting in the Canadian Black Watch as a youth in Canada as a resident of Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy, the highest tides in the world nearby, where I once picked dulse at the right Moon tide there for harvesting, and he as a citizen of the US in then in Merchant Marine, Murmansk, Russia lend-lease runs and later aboard the USS Buckner (what the US called the bay in Japan it first occupied in WWII, also one of the camps at West Point Military Academy, also there another camp the 10th Mountain Division. I was on the preliminary archaeological survey of Fort Drum, NY back in 1983, where the 10th Mountain Division moved to from Camp Hale in Colorado now its "permanent" cantonment near Watertown, NY.) always thought well of Japanese people, their craftsmanship and culture. As did my father who stressed the success of Army Japanese Americans who were highly decorated for their bravery fighting in Europe, he had served in Italy.

My grandfather's brother Leman Chapman Urquhart, a Savannah harbor pilot, put in charge as captain of the "SS City of Atlanta" in January 1942 after the Dec. 7, 1941 attack at Pearl Harbor (which I read recently 25% of our casualties there were from our own falling munitions after fired up into the air) in New York City after the Nazi's also declared war, was torpedoed off of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina by U-123 with a loss of 43 he among them though, only two survivors. The Captain of the U-boat was interviewed by a high school associate, an investigative television reporter in NY for CBS, Lou Young. There is an interesting book "Operation Drumbeat" by scholar Michael Gannon about the "Battle of the Atlantic" though they misspelled his name. Savannah lines made regular runs from Manhattan, NY to Savannah. I once mistakenly queried the National Archives after the S.S. City of Savannah, which they told me they stopped a "German raider" off our coast and took over 240 POW's. A renamed "Q-ship" no doubt disguised as an unarmed vessel.

What reminded me, or motivated me to write was the 1981 meetings of the Society for Historical Archaeology December meetings in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania which I drove to and back in an ice storm too after locating a buried circa 1730s ship hulk in the landfill of Manhattan in the last back-hoe test allowed. It became known after the site developer for the consortium of British banks that became National Westminster Bank since absorbed and renamed, the "Ronson" ship. I photographed a number of pieces of the ship in a wet lab against a 2" grid, for Warren Reise and Shelly Smith. The whole thing was done by March 6 and taken to landfill on Staten Island. The point is in the museum there in Philadelphia was an excellent documentary of the making of the samurai sword by traditional methods. Which reminds me of another enigma, that the Dutch and Portuguese had been in Japan very early and a circular blade guard was found on another site the early reputed "Augustine Heerman's Warehouse" site between Whitehall, Pearl, Bridge and Broad Streets, in lower Manhattan, where Paul Revere's grandfather also once lived, excavated also in the winter after the "175 Water Street" site the "Ronson Ship" was found in by me and African-American Bert Herbert with the back-hoe operator Fred, once a West Point Academy MP during WWII whose unit he was picked out of for height did not survive the war. It might be that the unprovenienced blade guard had its origin in Japan, Augustine Heerman ambassador and glass trader from the Catholic colony of Maryland. I read recently all those artifacts have gone to the State Museums in Albany, NY where they'll hire three people to process them from the various sites from lower Manhattan once stored at the South Street Seaport Museum which no longer had the room or funds for them it said.

I particular liked the video of the "pull saw" which my grandfather Lawrence G. Urquhart often tried to explain to us. He had a small Japanese Buddha and two Yuzen prints of tigers on silk one the male at night under the moon and the other nursing the "kittens" under the "bushes".