Original subtitles

Please excuse me for entering.

Thank you for inviting me.

Now, I would like to offer you some tea.

How does it please you?

What you are tasting is informed

by the fortuitous events of the past few days.

The magnificent specimen of ambergris wenowhaveon board

once passed through the whale,

and its lovely essence has permeated every aspect of the vessel.

She was built in 1987,

in Innoshima of Hiroshima, by Hitachi Zosen.

She has an overall length of 129.5 meters,

a breadth of 19.4 meters,

and weighs 7638 tons.

She is not as big as her predecessor,

but she is slightly faster for her loss in mass.

Her name means new.

To perfect the art of whaling,

she has reinvented herself over and over again.

This is the fourth Nisshin Maru,

but, in Japanese, the number 4 is associated with death.

Thus we call her, simply, Nisshin Maru.

The Nisshin Maru bears the faint scar from an encounter

some years ago in the Southern Ocean.

It was a calm day.

I remember the extraordinary clarity of the water,

and the reflections across the melting ice.

In Japan, we recognize ourselves as apart of nature.

And by accepting the impermanence of our existence,

we try to gain a deeper understanding of the world.

We call this mono no aware.

Yet, what happened that day left an indelible impression.

A former sealing ship, the Arctic Sunrise,

met with our vessel,

leaving the memory of her bow on our starboard side.

This event took place far from land on the high seas.

There is a shallow scar on her hull from that day,

but a deeper scar etched upon our memory.

And there is a much older story within the deeper scar.