Dissatisfaction with the competence of graduates from institutions of maritime education has been expressed for many years. In order to address the needs of shipping companies, as well as to respond to measures deriving from the Basic Act on Ocean Policy, a reorganization of the Faculty of Maritime Sciences at Kobe University took place from April of this year. With the revised curriculum, we look forward to significant improvement in the competence levels of graduates aspiring to be ship staff members as well as a more active advance into maritime clusters.

While ship propeller design becomes ever more minute due to advances in CFD (computational fluid dynamics), there has been little growth in performance and other added values due to the fixed nature of the basic principles involved and the fluid nature of design practices. In the search for a way to overcome this, and while keeping in mind Japan's maritime industry as a whole, we have followed two avenues of investigation: expanding the design focus to include hull dynamics and making radical changes in the materials used in propeller construction.

Gourds are common knowledge, but they have also played an important role in human history. One of the earliest cultivated plants, they were diffused to Japan 9,600 years ago and to the American continent 10,000 years before that. For human migration by sea, the securing of drinking water was essential. In pre-history that role was played by the gourd, what can be called mankind's original container. The gourd culture remains in abundance in Polynesia, the islands settled by ancient maritime peoples.