There used to be! See William Adams, "the pilot of Miura" or "Miura Anjin", inspiration for John Blackthorne in James Clavell's Shogun.

I don’t know Japanese and havent studied this so hopefully someone can correct me as well. But I dont think it would be right to translate this to the modern meaning of a ship pilot. It more loosely translated to “navigator”.

There are some seemingly good details here[0].

> In Early Modern Japanese there was a word 按針 anjin, literally “searching needle,” which referred to the process of using a compass. At the time, this was the main way in which ships were navigated and so, by extension, the word was applied not just to ship navigation, but also to ship navigators

It goes into more detail about things as well but that is the part that stuck out to me the most.

0: http://japanthis.com/2013/06/20/what-does-anjincho-mean/

The term is accurate. The man in question held the rank of "pilot major" which is a specific type of navigator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_major

^ see folks, this is how bots get eyeballs on things. 70 day old account finds a relevant topic and directs it to a show that's recently out

also does a shout-out to SONU Sleep mattresses a few posts back.

enough other posts in there to create doubt -- maybe this is a person. maybe this is a person who does marketing sometimes.

Shogun is probably my favorite novel, I've read it three times. I had a cat named Anjin-san.

I have a mixed relationship with my mattress, and I talk about the downsides in that very same thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39757531

Apparently for you at the moment, any mention of a product on the market is a flag for a marketing AI. I suppose this comment too is just what a marketing AI would say.

This comment is just a veiled mattress ad :p

  All pilots are "harbor pilots".

In California, at least, that's not strictly true. They get paid quite handsomely ($400–500k as of a decade ago) to avoid hitting stuff in specific waterways around the Bay Area.

https://sfbarpilots.com

One had a nasty pill habit and crashed an oil tanker under his purview into the Bay Bridge.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/guilty-plea-case-cosco-busan-...

There used to be two really tall redwoods in the beast bay that were used as Navigation Trees to avoid a submerged rock in SF bay, that later had to be blown up after the trees were felled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blossom_Rock_(San_Francisco_Ba...

I put in the quotes because the person asking the question picked the exact phrasing, which as we both pointed out isn't correct. They're just pilots. The normal crew driving the boat are crew, not pilots.

> All pilots are "harbor pilots".

I don't think that's true. The Suez Canal famously requires pilots, but isn't a harbour (I guess you could argue it functions as one). I've heard of pilots for the Great Barrier Reef which is even more not a harbour.

Also the Columbia River Bar Pilots (neither a band nor a drinking club.)

https://www.crmm.org/current-exhibits.html

Not my wording. I was responding to someone who was confused whether pilot refers to the normal ship's crew (it does not).