If you ever served on a Navy ship in the postwar era, there's a good chance you came home with one. A silk or satin jacket, custom embroidered, with your ship and hull number on the back, the year of your cruise across the shoulders, the ports of call running down the spine. A dragon coiling around a cherry blossom on one side. A tiger glaring from the other. The colors are a little louder than anything you'd wear back home, but on the ship, in port, on liberty, it was the thing.
The cruise jacket is one of the oldest souvenir traditions in the U.S. Navy. It's also the inspiration for everything we do at The Ship's Store. Here's the story.
What is a cruise jacket?
A cruise jacket, sometimes called a tour jacket, souvenir jacket, or in its most famous form a "Sukajan," is a commemorative jacket made for a sailor to mark a specific deployment. The classic version is silk or satin, brightly colored, reversible, and covered in embroidered artwork that tells the story of the cruise:
- Ship's name and hull number, usually big across the back.
- The year (or years) of the deployment.
- The ports of call visited, often running down the back panel or sleeves.
- Imagery tied to where the ship was: dragons and tigers for Asia cruises, eagles and flags for stateside, cherry blossoms for Japan, palm trees for tropical ports.
- The sailor's name or rate, embroidered on the front.
It wasn't gear. It wasn't uniform. It was the most personal thing a sailor brought home from a cruise, and it told everyone exactly where he'd been.
Where the tradition started
The cruise jacket tradition is a Yokosuka story.
After World War II, U.S. Navy sailors stationed in Japan started buying souvenir jackets from local tailors near the base. The tailors were already making bomber-style jackets for American servicemen using leftover military silk and parachute material. Sailors started ordering them with custom embroidery on the back: their ship, their cruise, their ports. The jackets were cheap, fast, and unlike anything available stateside. Word got around the fleet.
By the Korean War, the tradition was locked in. Every WESTPAC sailor who pulled into Yokosuka came home with at least one. The Japanese tailors got better and better at the embroidery work, and the designs got more elaborate. Dragons. Tigers. Map outlines. Ship silhouettes. Whole cruise itineraries stitched in silk thread.
Through Vietnam and into the 1970s and 80s, the cruise jacket was as much a part of a Western Pacific deployment as the deployment itself. Sailors who deployed to the Mediterranean got in on it too, with tailors in Naples and Athens doing their own versions. By the late Cold War, you could find a tailor in almost any major liberty port who would put a sailor's cruise on a jacket.
What makes a cruise jacket different from a generic souvenir jacket
People sometimes lump cruise jackets in with the broader "souvenir jacket" or "Sukajan" category. There's overlap, but a cruise jacket is something more specific. It's tied to a particular ship and a particular deployment. A sailor's cruise jacket isn't generic. The back panel names his ship, his year, his ports. Two sailors from the same ship on the same cruise have nearly identical jackets. Two sailors from different cruises don't.
That's the whole point. The jacket isn't a piece of clothing first. It's a record of a chapter of a sailor's life that he chose to wear on his back.
Cruise jackets today
The cruise jacket never went away. Tailors in Yokosuka still take orders. Vendors at reunions and online still produce them. If you served on a ship and want a properly embroidered jacket made for your cruise, you can still get one.
But the jacket has always been a specialty piece, and it comes with tradeoffs:
- Expensive. A custom-embroidered silk or satin jacket is a lot more money than a printed tee, and the price has only climbed over the years.
- Cool weather only. A satin jacket isn't a summer garment. It's for fall, winter, indoor events, the occasional cool evening.
- No moisture. Rain, drizzle, snow, a spilled drink: any of it can ruin the satin. The embroidery doesn't love getting wet either.
- Hard to care for. No tossing it in the washer. Most jackets are dry clean only, and the embroidery can snag.
For a lot of sailors, the jacket lives in the closet most of the year and comes out for ship reunions, the Navy ball, cool weekend nights. It's the dress version of the cruise. It's not what you grab on a Tuesday.
Where the cruise shirt comes in
Our cruise designs are built on the cruise jacket template. The layout on every back design is the one Navy sailors have been using since Yokosuka in 1948: the ship's name and hull number large across the back, the year of the deployment, the ports of call listed down the design, the operations the ship took part in, the air wing or embarked units. Same story, same elements, same purpose.
What's different is the format. Instead of silk and embroidery, we print the design on quality tees, long sleeves, and hoodies. That solves all four of the practical issues with a jacket:
- Affordable enough to own more than one, gift to a shipmate, or replace when one wears out.
- Wearable year-round, including the summer months when a jacket lives in the closet.
- Survives rain, sweat, washer, dryer. Wear it on the boat dock, at the cookout, mowing the lawn.
- No special care. Wash and wear.
The shirts aren't a replacement for the jacket. The jacket is still the dress version of the tradition. The shirt is the everyday version, the one you actually wear, the one that gets faded and soft and ends up in the bottom of the drawer because you never want to give it up.
If you served on a ship and want your cruise back in your closet, that's what we're here for. If your cruise isn't already in the catalog, message us and we'll add it.
Browse the catalog by ship to find your cruise. Don't see it? Let us know and we'll get to work on the design.