Amadea
Amadea is a solitary cruiseliner, with no sisterships. She was built as yardnumber 2050 on the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries-wharf at Nagasaki, Japan. She is 192,82 meters long, 24,70 meters wide and her draft is 6,20 meters.She has a tonnage of 28.856 and she can accomodate 604 passengers served by 243 crew. She was rated 4-star plus by Berlitz.
Amadea was born a Japanese ship, named Asuka in december 1991 for Nippon Yusen Kaisha. This is one of the oldest and most well-known shipping firms in Japan, maybe even in the world. The beginning of the nineties was a new dawn for the Japanese passengerlines because of renewed enthousiasm.
In 1989 Nippon Yusen Kaisha, or NYK Lines, started up a new cruiseline under the Crystal Cruises name. They introduced quite a big liner named Crystal Harmony of 48.000 tons. Other Japanese lines followed swiftly with Mitsui OSK Lines introducing Nippon Maru a modest 21.000 ton cruiseliner in 1990, followed by Orient Venus of Japan Cruise Line, also known as Venus Cruise. Apart from Crystal Cruises, most companies concentrated on Asiatic Cruises with 20.000 to 30.000 ton liners but these new ships gave Japan a real cruiseboost.
Asuka floated out at the 6th of april 1991. Her first cruise started in december 1991 from Yokohama to Taiwan and she was also sailing Asiatic cruises for most of her carreer, that only brought her as far as Australia. She is the only cruiseliner under the name of NYK besides the Crystal Cruises fleet that was expanded in 1995 with Crystal Symphony. Because of that, the NYK cruisedivision is also known as Asuka Cruise. Asuka flew the Japanese flag with her homeport being Tokio untill 2005. After that, NYK needed a larger ship because of a rapidly growing demend for her cruises. Asuka was replaced by Crystal's Crystal Harmony from 2006 onwards. Therefore, the bigger ship was remaned Asuka II. Just before being transferred, Asuka came to Europe for the first time. At the 12th of march 2006 the former Asuka started cruising for the German operator Phoenix Reisen as their Amadea and sails worldwide cruises under their banner.
Anyone who can name five great Japanese liners from the twenties, please send me an email. Japanese shipping is not that well known in Europe or America, also not with me. But we have to admit, a big country only existing out of islands has a great maritime tradition and passenger shipping is one of them. But the fact is, we don't see many Japanese passenger liners in the western waters. One of the reasons is that Japanese passengerlines started building new ships to replace a few old ones only in the beginning of the nineties in a somewhat larger scale.
Picture 1 shows Amadea in her Phoenix colours in 2006, leaving IJmuiden in the outer harbour.
Picture 2 shows her in her original livery of NYK Cruises as Asuka sailing in the Northsea Channel near Velsen Zuid.
