Japanese Ship-naming Conventions - Merchant Ships

Merchant Ships

The word maru (丸, meaning "circle"?) is often attached to Japanese ship names. The first ship known to follow this convention was the Nippon Maru, flagship of daimyo Toyotomi Hideyoshi's 16th century fleet. There are several theories which purport to explain this practice:

• The most common is that ships were thought of as floating castles, and the word referred to the defensive "circles" or maru that protected the castle.
• That the suffix -maru is often applied to words representing something that is beloved, and sailors applied this suffix to their ships.
• That the term maru is used in divination and represents perfection or completeness, or the ship as a small world of its own.
• A legend of Hakudo Maru, a celestial being that came to earth and taught humans how to build ships. It is said that the name maru is attached to a ship to secure celestial protection for it as it travels.
• For the past few centuries, only non-warships bore the -maru ending. It was intended to be used as a good hope naming convention that would allow the ship to leave port, travel the world, and return safely to home port: hence the complete circle arriving back to its origin unhurt.
• Note also that "Hinomaru", or "sun-disc", is a name often applied to the national flag of Japan.

Today commercial and private ships are still named using this convention.