Harbors

[Vutall]

Harbors
Synonymous with safety, harbors are protected areas of calm waters where ships dock. In a harbor, cargo and passengers can transfer without fear of choppy waters or piratical attacks. Ports built at harbors generally break down into two types, river and sea ports, and focus on fishing, defense, shipbuilding, trade, or a combination of these functions.

Regardless of their primary role, harbors also serve to facilitate and protect trade. Many villages and cities would starve within a generation if not for the network of ports for shipping and receiving necessary staples. Local daimyō appoint governors and magistrates to oversee trade, inspect cargoes, collect tariffs, and administer any relevant licenses or permits. While many lower-level bureaucrats and agents are easily bribed to overlook small-scale infractions, actual magistrates often aren’t as easily (or at least as cheaply) convinced

Most harbors are part of a bustling town or city, in which they might be the dominant feature or merely a district, and they are always an important economic asset. They provide employment for peasants as laborers at docks and warehouses, through support businesses that repair and stock ships for voyages, or by entertaining and providing hospitality for visiting sailors and merchants

Port Layout
Local geography, water conditions, intended function, and desired berthing capacity all determine a port’s design. Ports might grow around natural harbors and inlets, or should coastal geography be problematic, they might use artificial basins. Regardless, a port and its harbor serve to protect ships from weather, cur-rents, and waves. In addition to the natural protection a harbor provides, this is often accomplished through the use of breakwaters: protective barriers of wood or stone rising from the water to insulate harbors against the crash and wear of the waves. Some ports go further, maintaining seawalls to help protect against tsunami and other fierce storms.

Ports allow ships to berth at a wharf or pier. Wharfs, sometimes known as docks or quays, are long wood or stone promenades along a natural coast or artificial basin where ships can tie up. Piers, used in shallow waters or to increase capacity, extend perpendicularly from the coast into deeper waters. When a ship arrives, agents of the local magistrate inspect cargo and assess tariffs, applying their seal to approved cargo. Then, dockworkers form human chains from below decks to the wharf or pier, loading goods onto carts and wagons bound for other vessels or nearby warehouses.

In order to make the most of rocky coastlines, some ports include warehouses and shops built atop small islands up to a hundred paces or so from the main-land. Wooden bridges span the distance to connect these buildings with each other and with the rest of the town. When such natural islands are insufficient for a town’s expanding needs, inhabitants desperate for space sometimes construct buildings atop wooden stilts anchored below the waves

Just inland of the docks, administrative facilities issue licenses and permits and provide flags for at sea communications, as well as maps and charts. Nearby businesses support ships by offering supplies and services for voyage preparation. Ship parts and maintenance materials, such as sail patches, pitch, tar, rudders, and more, are also available. Guild houses typically offer storage facilities close to the docks and sell livestock, rice, tofu, and even seeds and soil

Farther inland are businesses catering to merchants and sailors, including inns and places to seek drink and entertainment. Such harbor facilities are rarely visited by those of the higher classes, who see them as places for the dishonorable and crude to congregate. The town or city beyond the harbor serves to house and support the local workforce.

Lighthouses
Many ports and coastal areas of Rokugan feature a lighthouse to alert ships at night and in the fog to the presence of rocks, shallows, and other potentially deadly obstacles that might otherwise go unseen. A typical light-house consists of a small tower supported by steeply sloping walls, which are usually constructed of wood but may be of stone in some environments. The lantern room is at the top, under the long, gently sloping roof and curved eaves typical of Rokugani buildings. Many lighthouses broaden at the base in resemblance of a typical village house; the parts of such a house that extend beyond the footprint of its lighthouse tower typically are topped with a thatched roof. The lighthouse keeper lives in this house, ascending into the tower above as required by their duties.

Most lighthouses burn oil to provide illumination for alerting ships at sea. In more prosperous or fortunate ports, however, shugenja may invoke a fire kami to provide the blaze. By preparing a shintai to house a fire kami, a shugenja can provide a comfort-able place for the spirit to reside as well as ensuring an everlasting flame—at least as long as the kami is properly propitiated. The keeper of such a lighthouse also serves as shrine keeper, and the lives of mariners hinge on their diligence in appeasing the kami.

Port Types
Ports are located either on freshwater rivers or on the sea, each requiring key design differences. River ports accommodate only rafts and flat-bottomed river craft, and they are protected by a single breakwater upriver. The larger river ports might have sprawling wharfs or artificial basins along the riverbanks, but smaller river ports require craft to beach in the mud. Alternatively, amid salty coastal air filled with crying sea birds, sea ports host fleets of fishing boats and mammoth junk ships, necessitating a pair of long breakwaters to maintain calm harbor waters. Long piers from the shore reach for deeper waters and maximize berthing space along a wharf.

Port Functions
A port’s function—to serve the military, fishing, trade, shipbuilding, or a combination of these—determines its form. Each capability a port needs brings with it specific facility requirements. A single port can serve any number of these functions as long as the proper facilities are allocated.

Fishing Ports
Fishing ports focus on smaller craft with crews ranging from a dozen to a lone sailor. Commercial fishing in Rokugan relies primarily on two techniques: gillnetting and cormorant fishing. Gillnetters use a net to catch saltwater fish, usually small schools of fish like sardines, halfbeak, and horse mackerel along the coast, or larger catches like tuna, salmon, snapper, and sea bass on the open ocean. Cormorant fishers utilize a trained bird to catch freshwater fish, predominantly salmon and trout.

For gillnetting, relatively small vessels sail into waters with crews of three or four people. They then extend chains of typically four to six gillnets, each of which may be more than sixty feet wide, deep into the water. The openings in the nets are sized based upon the fish that are currently in season. The nets’ placement varies according to the fish in season and the cur-rent. At different times of year, different fish are much more readily available.

The small rowboats used for cormorant fishing, typically crewed by two to three people, set out before the dawn. A smoky torch is held aloft over the front of the boat, while the bird handler holds ropes tied to the necks of between five and ten birds. The ropes are tight enough to prevent a bird from swallowing a fish, while the torch disturbs the fish, making it easier for the birds to catch them. When a cormorant captures a fish, the handler brings it back to the boat and retrieves the catch from the bird’s throat. With skilled handlers, cormorants can catch upward of 150 fish an hour

Fish are highly perishable, so fishing ports require a large docking capacity to help ensure that fish don’t rot while a ship awaits an open berth. Even so, fishing ports and workers reek of half-dried fish and rotting innards. These ports have extensive facilities for cold storage, salting, and drying to preserve fish, as well as a fresh fish market. Mountain river-fishing ports utilize ice, as do a handful of large Phoenix fishing ports. In the latter case, student shugenja propitiate the kami of the air and water, who provide ice.

Military Ports
Military port facilities provide security and are a major deterrent to bandits and pirates. Their soldiers also assist magisterial agents with inspections. Military ports require fortified and secured private berths that could otherwise support additional merchant ships, and they need barracks and storehouses for arms and soldiers. Most military river ports have an antipiracy bridge-gate downriver staffed with archers, and sea ports have extensive counterpiracy facilities and take measures against the threat of hostile naval forces. Such measures can include fortified breakwaters with archer towers, battlements, or—particularly in Crab ports—even heavier equipment like catapults. Military vessels often patrol coastal harbors and the sea lanes between them to both deter and combat piracy

Shipbuilding Ports
Shipbuilding ports can perform major repairs even beneath a ship’s waterline. Dry docks are different from piers in that they are surrounded on three sides by rock walls that extend into the sea floor, with a reinforced pitch-and-bamboo gate that seals the ship in. A large wheel built into one wall removes the water, which lowers the ship onto blocks to allow access to a ship’s ventral surface.

Shipbuilding ports have substantial stores of lumber, pitch, tar, sail, line, and rope, as well as specialized preformed metal and wood ship parts, and they employ skilled artisans who can make ship parts. Repair yards also hire hull divers, who are capable of holding their breath for long minutes to scrape away barnacles and perform other maintenance below the waterline. The variety of work at these ports tends to attract unskilled heimin hoping to learn a trade

Trading Ports
The vast majority of ports in Rokugan were built for the purpose of trade or have come to support it in addition to serving in their other functions. Trading ports employ hordes of dockworkers to shift cargo, and they have a strong guild presence for any number of commodities. The tariff magistrates have a small agent house at every berth so that inspections and tariff assessments don’t unduly delay commerce. Trading ports tend to have slightly better market prices and selection than inland cities and villages, which rely on guilds and merchants to transport goods to them. The abundance of goods and money trading hands at these ports makes them a tempting target for pirates and bandits.

Assessing Tariffs
Tariff assessments on shipments average around five percent of the cargo value. However, they vary based on the assessor’s whim, the relationship between the assessor and captain, and the nature of the relationship between the ship’s and harbor’s clans. The type and value of the goods and the demand for them can also impact the percentage

Harbor Shrines
Most ports host a variety of shrines, which are built along river banks, on breakwaters, at the ends of piers, or on wharfs. Such shrines are most commonly dedicated to one or more of the Seven Great Fortunes or of the numerous Lesser Fortunes, or to kami local to the river, a seaside boulder, or another element of the harbor or its environs. Shrines may be built to benefit fishing or trade, or to encourage favorable winds and fair seas. Some of the most frequently seen harbor shrines are dedicated to the following Fortunes:

-Hamanari: The Fortune of Fish and Generous Meals is often depicted as a sleeping fisher-man with a half-empty bowl.

-Daikoku: The Fortune of Wealth and patron of merchants and farmers, Daikoku is one of the Seven Great Fortunes. Daikoku’s shrines often feature a rice bowl and rat or the Fortune’s signature hammer.

-Suijin and Isora: The Fortune of the Sea and the Fortune of the Shore feature in shrines both together and individually, for the lovers are often distant from each other. Shrines often depict a jade kobune ship for Suijin and eternal flames for Isora.

-Wind Shrines: Kaze-no-Kami, the Fortune of Wind, governs the Fortunes of the four winds: Tamon (North), Zocho (South), Jikoju (East), and Komoku (West). Shrines at many coast-al harbors are dedicated to one or more of these Fortunes.

Port Towns
Ports require great numbers of laborers and administrators in order to run smoothly. It takes a robust town or city to house, feed, and entertain such a large work-force.

Government
Most port towns are controlled by a single clan, which installs the governor or magistrate. Even smaller ports are considered vital strategic assets, drawing representatives of important families. To organize and run the port and town, governors and chief magistrates hold court, where they interface with magistrates and important nobles, particularly those involved in trade or public works projects. The heimin of the trade guilds also appear in court; however, as they are members of a lower caste, their ability to formally participate is limited to mingling between sessions, observing, and delivering reports. A small number of ports are on clan borders, but because ports are so vital a resource for the Empire, the Emperor often maintains Imperial control of border ports to alleviate clan tensions and encourage fair trade.

Locals
Port towns are among the most diverse places in Rokugan, featuring visitors from other clans and—rarely—even gaijin. Most port towns also have far greater diversity in religious practices than similar-ly sized inland cities. Unlike in smaller villages where everyone knows everyone, most people in port towns are strangers, which makes them guarded around each other. Denizens are wary of thieves, scams, and distractions, all of which are plentiful. Violence is also a problem, especially at businesses catering to sailors, where fights break out with alarming frequency.

Town Life
Virtually every manner of entertainment is available in a port town; establishments with atmospheres ranging from raucous to elegant promise the finest tea, sake, and sushi. Music and theater, whether Kabuki drama, bunraku puppetry, or Nō plays, are performed at dedicated theaters, in court, and even on the street. Port towns are remarkable for the large itinerant population to be found at any time. With the possible exception of the busiest market cities, nowhere else in the Empire sees such a constant flux of travelers coming and going, as ships arrive and depart. Many ships and sailors ply fairly regular routes, resulting in familiar faces who become a part of the community, even if they are only seen once or twice a year

Social Mobility
Although it occurs rarely, even the lowliest heimin can leave port as a deck-hand and return a ship’s captain. Control of a ship in the islands is equivalent to land ownership in Rokugan, which is to say it is the province of the noble class. While heimin ship captains are not recognized as anything more than commoners on mainland Rokugan, on the Islands of Spice and Silk, ship captains are treated as minor nobles regardless of blood. That said, the vast majority of ships in the Mantis fleet are captained by samurai