12 April 2026 · Lecture 01The Pirate Coast
Hong Kong and the South China Sea
Enrichment lectures · Destination research · East Asia
Cultural Navigators
Enrichment lectures and destination research for luxury small-ship operators in East Asia — Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the China coast, read in the languages of the region, with every substantive claim checked against a named source and the checking published.
Five talks
A complete programme delivered aboard RCYC Luminara, Hong Kong to Tokyo, April 2026 — slides and guest companion guides, published in full under an open licence.
One region
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the coastal Chinese ports. Nothing outside East Asia, at any price.
Every claim cited
A verification appendix ships with the guest material. Claims that cannot be checked to standard are kept out and listed as such.
What you can buy
Four lines of work
Each is bought by a different function, and each draws on the same underlying research.
01Enrichment lectures
Thirty-minute talks built to the operator's visual register, scripted and rehearsed, with a guest companion guide for each.
02Destination product strategy
Port files, route themes, seasonal sensitivity registers and named regional partners, for product development and voyage design.
03Crew capability
The same material cut short and retrievable, for onboard operations and fleet training — including what to say when a guest asks the hard question.
04Guest editorial
Pre-departure series, in-suite companion, per-port briefs and printed programme copy, for CRM and marketing. A delivered example is below.
How an engagement begins
Start with one route
A fixed-scope route review
One itinerary, read end to end against the regional record. It is deliberately small, so you can see the quality of the work before committing a season to it.
- A port file for every call — what the copy says, what the record shows, and what the difference is worth on board
- A sensitivity register for the sailing dates, so the calendar is checked before the itinerary is committed
- Two or three route themes the itinerary already contains and is not yet using
- A named source for every claim, and an honest list of what could not be verified
Fixed fee, agreed before work begins. Dated delivery. If it is useful, the lecture programme and guest material follow from it; if it is not, you have spent one fee and lost nothing.
Delivered work · RCYC Luminara, Hong Kong to Tokyo
A programme you can read
Five thirty-minute talks on alternating sea days, each with a guest companion guide, delivered aboard the Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection's Luminara in April 2026. The whole series is published — the decks as delivered, the guides as guests received them.
14 April 2026 · Lecture 02The Islands Everyone Wanted
From Taiwan to the Fuzhou trade and the Ryūkyū Kingdom
16 April 2026 · Lecture 03Sugar Power
When samurai came for the sugar
18 April 2026 · Lecture 04Three Capitals
Kyoto, Osaka and Edo — ancient capital, merchant city, shogun's seat
20 April 2026 · Lecture 05From Treaty Port to Global Metropolis
The making of modern Japan, 1853–2026
Published openly. Every item above is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. An operator can read the entire programme, circulate it internally, and adapt it under the same terms, before commissioning anything.
An operator buying enrichment is usually buying a biography and a promise. Here the deliverable is on the table before the conversation starts. The wider archive — syllabi, essays and serialised chapters — sits in the Reading Room.
Guest editorial · Delivered, spring 2026
Seadays
The guest-facing web companion built for two East Asian voyages sailed in March and April 2026 — a page for every call and a page for every day at sea, written to be read in a suite or on a phone. It stands as the record of those voyages, and as the working example of what this line of work produces.
Tokyo to Hong Kong through Nagasaki, Incheon and Shanghai in March; Hong Kong to Tokyo through the Ryūkyū arc in April — the same April sailing whose five lectures are published above. The talks carried the argument in the room; Seadays carried it for the rest of the voyage.
- 15 port pages, one per call, with what to look for ashore
- 13 sea-day essays, each taking up a question the next port raises
- 8 thematic pieces — the Qing tributary order, the Ryūkyū Kingdom's dual subordination, the sugar economy, the treaty ports
- 2 route maps and 2 daily schedules
Forty-four pages, no frameworks and no login, built to load on a ship's wi-fi. This is what the fourth line of work looks like finished rather than described.
The method
What the record shows
Who does the work
Standing
Dr Christopher Gerteis, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Japanese History, SOAS University of London.
Creator and Co-General Editor, Cultural History of East Asia — six volumes, Bloomsbury Academic, spanning three and a half thousand years.
The Hashima XR Project — historians, software designers and heritage researchers in Japan and the United Kingdom, documenting a contested industrial site in extended reality.
- Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation. Cornell University Press, 2021.Winner, 2022 Best Book Award, SOAS University of London.
- Gender Struggles: Wage-earning Women and Male Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan. Harvard University Press, 2010.Second Prize, 2011 Triannual Book Award, European Association for Japanese Studies.
- Japan Since 1945: From Postwar to Post-Bubble. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
One region, held at depth
Scope
Covered
Japan, including the Ryūkyū and Amami chains, Hokkaidō and the Inland Sea · South Korea · Taiwan · Hong Kong · the coastal Chinese ports on Northeast Asian routes.
Not covered
Nothing outside East Asia. No Pacific, no Southeast Asia, no South Asia, no Australasia.
Get in touch
Enquiries
Tell me the itinerary and the season. A first reply usually comes within two working days, and the useful first conversation is twenty minutes about one route.
