Branimir Šoić

As a cadet on the Velebit, I made my first trip to Japan in 1961. Back then, their ports had little in the way of facilities and ships had to be tied to buoys. It was common to see elderly Japanese men wearing traditional attire, complete with swords, while the women mostly wore their well-known kimonos. However, this tradition has slowly faded.
During my first visit to Kobe as a young cadet, I was amazed to see a large department store with six floors. The top floor had a day-care where mothers could leave their children while they shopped. It was also the first time I had ever seen an escalator. In front of each escalator, a Japanese woman wearing a kimono would hand out small gifts. It is customary for Japanese people to bow to everyone they meet, so these ladies bow to every person who passed by. As a young and inexperienced person, I rode the escalator up and down, passing by the ladies and watching them bow to me. I was young, and rather uncouth.
This was also a time when they were somewhat resentful toward us “white people” due to what they had endured the war, but this attitude diminished with time. We could say that a little samurai, that bushido, the sense of honour and code of conduct and living, crouches in every Japanese person. It is rare for foreigners to be invited to their homes. Japanese people will invite you to a restaurant, but they guard their privacy. This made us foreigners feel like we were not fully welcome. The Japanese were not fond of Americans, and as a result, many clubs were Japanese-only and only those with a Japanese “sponsor” would be admitted. These clubs often hosted famous geishas who were skilled musicians and entertainers. Fortunately, I had a Japanese business partner who took me to such places. This tradition continued until the late 1960s.
My Japanese agent, a friend from Hiroshima, had a father who was a whole head shorter than I was. He was a 9th Dan Aikido master. I gave him a small ivory Buddha that I bought in India as a present and he in turn would take me with him to watch them practice aikido. He told me: “You Westerners will master the physical skills and learn the technique through hard work and practice, but spiritually you will never match the level of any Japanese. We practice with our grandfathers and the samurai code of honour is etched in our blood.”
I realised that those of us who were born in Kostrena have a code of honour compelling us to sail the deep seas that is just as deeply ingrained as the Japanese fighting skills.
So I visited their home for lunch. They are aware that we Westerners aren't exactly capable of sitting cross-legged on the floor for a long time, so they devised a little wooden stool to make it easier for us. The two of us, my agent and I, sat at the table, while his wife served us from the right-hand side. She knelt beside me, served me, got up and approached her husband to his right, knelt again and then served him. She didn't join us at the table but rather moved to the side, prepared to see if we needed anything else.
Over time, you learn that when someone gives you something, you should receive it with both hands, but also give something back in the same way. For example, there was a situation in 1981 when gifts were exchanged between representatives of Rijeka and Kawasaki as sister cities. According to protocol, I was supposed to present several souvenirs from Rijeka. To the side, the agent asked me to accept a gift from the representative of Kawasaki because it would be an immense shame and insult for them if I did not accept it. I had never even thought about not accepting it.
I made an effort to learn about a hundred Japanese words over time to communicate better, and they were quite pleased by that. To this day I can still count in Japanese. In all honesty, I never had any unpleasant experiences in Japan, even many things puzzled me. I recall Kobe's Motomachi, where you leave the bar and enter the street, you'll see an open sewer next to the houses and Japanese men had no compunction about urinating in that sewer around the corner, while their homes are spotlessly clean. Once, I saw a man dressed in rags who was begging for money so I gave him some spare change. Later, my agent explained that he was not really a beggar, but rather a monk who had taken a vow of poverty for a specific period. In the late 1960s, I witnessed those notorious railway assistants pushing people onto trains to cram more passengers in it.
During my time there, communication with our people back home was done via telephone from the Jugolinija branch office. I would usually arrive there around 5 p.m. due to the time difference. Their office hours were from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. and from 1 to 5 p.m., with a one-hour break in between for employees to eat, engage in exercise, or take a stroll. At 5 p.m., everyone was still hard at work at the agency and it wasn't until 5:15 or 5:30 p.m. that the first typists shyly began putting away their typewriters and glancing around to see who would be the first to leave. Those of the lowest ranks left first. My agent was somewhere in the middle and upward. I was upset when 6 p.m. passed and he was only just beginning to get ready to leave while everyone else was still working hard. We went to a Pachinko parlour first, where he played on a gambling machine with small balls. He inserted some coins and then hit the balls. After that, we went to a bar. He returned home at around 8 p.m. I was worried about what his live-in girlfriend would say but he told me that if he came home earlier, she would think he had lost his job. He was living with his girlfriend and they had postponed their wedding because she was still working. When they get married, she would lose her job and become a housewife. That’s the way things were in the 1970s.
Navigating through Japan’s internal waters was challenging. One time I arrived in Nagoya Harbour, and I had to make my way through a narrow passage filled with a multitude of fishing boats, even though I had set out at 6 a.m. to avoid them. I barely avoided hitting them. I managed to dock safely and I wrote a letter of protest. However, I received a thorough ‘dressing down’ because the fishing lobby was incredibly powerful and there was no authority that could prohibit them navigating according to their own customs. As a result, those of us with larger ships were forced to manoeuvre around the fishing boats, and God forbid if you collided with them.
The last time I sailed to Japan was aboard the Opatija in 1996, when Croatialine (formerly Jugolinija) was still in operation. It was a well-known international company and we were treated with great respect in Japanese harbours, enjoying certain privileges. During typhoon season, for example, all ships had to leave the harbour for deeper waters, and once the typhoon passed, they could return – and that’s when you see how much they respect you. The fact that Jugolinija's ships were among the first to return showed how highly regarded we were as a longstanding and reliable client. There was never a day when one of our ships was not in Japan.