posted on Jul, 26 2012 @ 04:53 PM
Ok, here come some numbers, haha.
Now the situation being considered is China and Japan having a mutually beneficial exhchange (China gets useful workers living there; Japanese get to
not die yet).
Lets generate a VERY liberal estimate of about how fast this can be done if only China and Japan are working in this.
The far-east has around 450,000 sea-faring men- many of these are tied up in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Korea.
Lets say that leaves something like 350,000 sea-faring men between China and Japan.
Now most of those vessels are tied up in fishing and and trans-Pacific trade voyages essential to the running of both countries.
Lets say that as many as 100,000 men worth of vessels may be temporarily free from fishing and intra-Asian trade (not likely, but this is a VERY
liberal estimate remember).
Lets say that by emergency reduction of crews to around maybe 70,000 or so ( from 100,000) and by converting non-living quarter spaces into makeshift
quarters, we may squeeze 100,000 civilians onto those vessels at any given moment (so there are now 170,000 on what 100,000 sea-farers normally
service).
Again, being liberal, we will ignore the realities of how many ships a given port can service in a day ( which in reality is an important fact, as
this involves 500-1000 vessels).
The shortest voyage for the Japanese would be to go from southern Japan to South Korea, but I don't think it is reasonable to expect 40 million
Japanese to be allowed travel through North Korea. This leaves Russia as the obvious choice.
Lets say that the ferrying ships are traveling from the major port of Hakodate in the North of Japan to Vladivostok, which is the closest Russian port
it can reach. That is around a 400 mile trip, which the average vessel takes average of 10-12 hours to make each way going the fairly fast 40 knots.
So every day the ships operate (assuming a mean trip of around a day for each ship based on this distance), they can move 100,000 Japanese to China
through the Russian coast. The ships would be expected to run the round-trip maybe 5 days a week on average at best I would guess, when you factor in
time to refuel, time to load and unload passengers, and time to service and repair). And most ships I understand are in port for around the same
amount of time they are at sea, so this may also be stretching it.
So assuming all of these liberal exaggerations, you have 260 trips per year for the entire fleet in question to ferry, and again, each day you have
100,000 Japanese moved.
That means with this scenario, you are moving 26 million Japanese over the course of a year, and we are saying 40 million for Tokyo and surrounding
district.
Now of course there are assumptions built into this estimate, but even if all those assumptions are wrong, it is hard for this to be an order of
magnitude faster. It might be something like twice as fast, if for instance people are packed like sardines, but I don't see this being done in a
month, for instance.