Early last Saturday morning, from a cliff top at the tip of the Miura peninsula, I watched the Mikage slip into Tokyo Bay en route to the port of Funabashi. It was grimy from nautical toil and decidedly ugly on the eye, but there are few more thrilling ships out on the seas.
And if you like your gadgetry game-changing but also attractive to barnacles and a challenge to the idea that Silicon Valley has a pre-eminent right to define “tech”, the Mikage is a real treat. In January, the 313ft-long coastal container ship chugged into history when it successfully docked at Sakai port after a two-day, 161-nautical mile sail from Tsuruga. It was the first merchant ship on this scale to make such a voyage entirely autonomously and, crucially, without a human soul aboard to jump on to the controls if things went wrong.
Worldwide, the race to perfect fully autonomous operations for large commercial vessels is intense, and arguably of far greater practical importance, than that for self-driving cars. The Mikage’s achievement came just seven days after another Japanese shipbuilder demonstrated the first fully autonomous journey of Soleil, a 15,500 ton, 730ft car ferry. The breakthrough claimed by the Mikage is that, in addition to the voyage itself, it handled the intricate business of docking and undocking entirely without a crew. (In another first, it integrated the assistance of drones.)