Lost at Sea
Crewless ships with autonomous navigation reach islanders in Japan
A distant island has been approaching to me with the boarding pass of the ANA 737 Max in late August. In 2018, a group of local revitalization project took a short flight to land on the western part of Shimane, 900 kilometers away from Tokyo Airport. Shimane faces a tough challenge of demographic decline and a severe industry fall for decades. During those years, with local residents declining to mere 60,000, the vast land remains equal to a third of Chiba prefecture, which habits 630 m cosmopolitan dwellers in action. I am still a Chiba citizen. As for Shimane, it was called marginal habitation.
Shimane has limited primitive industry such as fishery and farming, producing sea shells and Wasabi, a garlic for raw fish decorating the fish bowl and sushi plates in fancy restaurants. These are the luxury dishes for metropolitan Tokyoites. In the big city dwelling, the advanced work is hard being threatened by artificial intelligence but the food is nice with diligent sushi master. What I found during the six-month public project of the Japanese government is that the situation in rural areas was much worse than described in the Japanese media. Tokyo has been injecting financial support. Short-term visitors took the financial program to please hospital farmers and fishermen of Shimane, at least temporarily. It was devastating sketch. What is more horrifying to me is the reality that the 418 remote inhabited islands of Japan will be facing even tougher challenge for the years to come.
A recent episode of the Economist, “Sailing without sailors”, illustrates a deep concern of Japanese remote islanders. Japan has 6,800 islands with 418 being inhabited. The coastal shipping industry suffers a declining engagement, currently employing mere 21,000 mariners. An inverted demographic chart suggests an ageing population to detailing the segment. More than half of those mariners are over 50. More than a quarter of them are even over 60. The ageing workforce will be gradually forgotten. Isolated remote habitants receive less supply from affluent islands with big cities.
The writer describes the technological solution to the devastating concern. Japanese shipping firms attempt to make sailing autonomous. Giant firms received $31m from philanthropic group, the Nippon Foundation. Leader of the group denotes that few transport options to reach habitants attribute to a further isolation from the rest of the world. There is no internet at sea, either. Digital connection has yet to provide islanders with a surf option for the digital resources.
A British paper compounds the story with technological opportunities and threats. Crewless navigation in long-haul voyages keeps the limited transport volume at the sustainable stage while fewer workers hang on physically demanding work. Long stretches from home could become shorter with mechanical solutions. Self-steering ships will be reducing the sea accidents by farther visual coordination on mechanical superiority over the human perceptibility. The statistics unveils that 70% of oceanic accidents have been made by human errors.
Sea lanes are not clearly drawn. Vessels can go any direction. With varying speed and size in the unsteady climates and submerging obstacles such as whales and dolphins, the algorithm of unmanned ships can be unimaginably complex. Further difficulties add the story to the area of unwanted security. Naval communication impedes slow data transfer a way 15 years behind the land transfer. Physical and digital cyber-pirates could emerge to cause the sudden interruption and record a huge loss in the balance sheets of shipping firms unless it is not covered by proper marine insurance. In insurer complication, the insurance firms will never reach the stage where financial institutions are able to calculate the premium and damage with the statistical analysis due to lack of data and compensation scheme.
Yet I agree with the general direction of the Nippon Foundation. They estimate that half of coastal fleet could be autonomous by 2040. In two decades from now, sailing ships with no captains will have achieved the transport to remote islands and sustain the habitation. While a consultancy, Japan Marine Science, provides islanders with the safe voyage, the government should consider the relocation plan of those isolated residents. Life is very tough over there.
The demographic challenge in Shimane project gave me a clear picture of tough local survival two years ago. Furthermore, the severe survival remains to be seen in even remote distributed islands on the Japanese map. I prayed for a good luck to 60,000 farmers and fishermen on my flight back home in Tokyo. With those local residents safely settled, the next challenge in shipping industry is, “What should we do with mariners in the coastal shipping industry?” The mounting evidence suggests that philanthropic and technological solutions should go hand in hand as leverage. The next captain in Tokyo works around the clock.
Reference: Japan’s push for autonomous ships