Sailing to the Heart of Japan
By Nick and Jenny Coghlan
Massive Sakurajima almost blocks off the head of Kagoshima Bay (“wan” in Japanese). Beyond the narrows, between its slopes and the city of Kagoshima on the western shore, the water becomes shallow. In 1941 Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy, noticed a superficial resemblance between the strait and the lagoon behind it, and the main anchorage of the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Oahu. Realizing that the key to a successful attack on Pearl would be ensuring that his air-carried torpedoes did not bury themselves in the unusually shallow muddy bottom before hitting their targets, he had his torpedo bombers practice for weeks at Kagoshima until they chanced on the perfect modification that allowed for shallow running.
Jenny wasn’t impressed that I’d been boning up on my history. She was looking anxiously ahead through the binoculars.
“Do shut up! We need somewhere to tie up.”
We scanned the heavily built-up shoreline south of the narrows. There were miles and miles of dockyards at the foot of high, green hills and no obviously friendly place for a small yacht to moor. The giveaway would be a cluster of masts. I took the binoculars from Jenny, but there were none to be seen. We slowed down.
“Why don’t we try Mira on the radio?” I said. “They’ve been here a couple of days already. They must have sorted things out.”
Jenny went below, grumbling that we never keep our radio on in port, so why would Phil? But he came up almost immediately once she made a hailing call on Channel 16. There were advantages to buddy-boating after all, I had to admit. Phil read out to us his precise GPS position, Jenny wrote it down and quickly located the spot on both our chart plotter and the paper chart I was following in the cockpit. Soon, we were heading into a narrow concrete cut, deep in the harbor, with sailboats moored to the vertical walls bows in. The harbor walls were so high, a precaution against typhoons, that their masts could not be seen from outside.
Phil hailed us and guided us into a slot formed by large foam buoys while simultaneously asking about our passage and telling us about Mira’s. Distracted as I was by his chitchat and the perplexing mooring arrangements, it was ten minutes before I noticed a line of ten or a dozen smartly dressed men on top of the harbor wall. Some were in uniform with peaked caps, some in bright blue blazers, all wore white gloves.
“Looks like the Toyota sales team’s here!” I said to Jenny.
Then, more seriously, I wondered if we were interrupting some sort of civic parade. Finally, I recalled that by an amazing coincidence we had arrived in Kagoshima exactly when we had randomly indicated we would in that fax, sent so long ago from Guam. This must be the official reception committee.
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