Kanko Maru
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The Kankō Maru ( Japanese 観 光 丸 ) was Japan's first steam-powered warship.
Technical specifications
The ship was built in the Netherlands in 1852 and entered service the following year under the name Soembing . In 1855 it was given to Japan. It was decommissioned in 1876 and later scrapped. It had a displacement of 400 tons and a length of 66 meters over all. In addition to three sailing masts, it had a 150 hp steam engine with a paddle wheel drive. The furnace was fired with coal. The Kankō Maru was armed with six cannons.
history
After the violent opening of Japan by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1854, Japan decided to order modern ships in the Netherlands, their only Western trading partner for the last 200 years of self-imposed isolation ( sakoku ). The ships were ordered from Janus Henricus Donker Curtius , head ( opperhoofden ) of the Dutch East India Company in Dejima , Japan. Since the import would take some time, Curtius asked that one of the Dutch warships in East India be handed over to the Japanese.
The Dutch warship Soembing , the name of an Indonesian volcano, was built in 1855 by King of the Netherlands Wilhelm III. given to the government of the Shogun . It was renamed in Kankō Maru ( 観 光 丸 , from a sentence from the Chinese classic I Ching " 觀 國 之 光 ").
The ship was used in Japan as a training ship for the newly formed Nagasaki Naval Training Center under the direction of Nagai Naoyuki . Then she was transferred with an all-Japanese crew of 103 men in April 1857 to the new naval training center in Edo , where she remained until 1876.
Replica
A faithful replica of the original Kankō Maru was built in 1987 for Japan in the Netherlands. Since then she has been used as a tourist ship for the “Huis ten Bosch” theme park in Sasebo near Nagasaki for trips along the coast.
Spaceship project
Kankō Maru is also the name of a Japanese space tourism project .