Mapping once had a noble purpose. Around the turn of the century, two such international attempts to map the entire world as a whole were launched. The one dedicated to mapping the land surface became entangled in nationalist squabbles and came to a standstill in 1989. However, marine mapmakers fared much better, and the effort born in 1903 to create GEBCO, the general bathymetric map of the oceans, has long survived.
But for our pressing modern demands, survival alone is not enough. Thanks to the inconvenient presence of the water obscuring the seabed, GEBCO has remained something of a chimera, the seabed still largely terra nullius, GEBCO’s few published sheets of little accuracy or practical use. The project’s longstanding association with the principality of Monaco – the rulers of the Grimaldi family are avid amateur oceanographers – is seen in today’s light as little more than dreamily charming. New blood, new energy, has long been needed.
Hence the start in 2017 of the Seabed 2030 project, intended to inject some ginger into what was initially a nice ideal, to wake everyone up – and hence the arrival in 2003, most interestingly, of a philanthropic body called the Nippon Foundation, which has begun to fund a large portion of it. I say interesting because Trethewey has dug up some fascinating background information on the Nippon Foundation, and it’s not too pretty.
The Tokyo-based body was founded by one Ryoichi Sasakawa, an industrial and gambling magnate who befriended Mussolini long ago, had his own private air force, called himself “the richest fascist in the world” – and was accused of a class after the war A war criminal. He managed to avoid execution, was eventually released and founded a gambling empire based on – the story gets weirder – the Japanese motorboat sport.
His philanthropy, believed to be to polish his posthumous reputation, is now Japan’s largest and has given at least $18 million to help the Seabed 2030 project. Many groups, especially in France, have refused to take money from Nippon, accusing Nippon of promoting right-wing and nationalist views. But the undersea mapmakers have a more relaxed outlook, they just want to do their job and not pass judgment on their donor.
