Japanese battleships
By the early 20th century, Japan was one of the five leading naval powers of the world, choosing to be on the Allied side during WWI when her navy could put to sea eight modern dreadnoughts and eight battlecruisers with 12in or
14in calibre guns, all except one built in Japan. Half of these capital ships were still on active service at the start of WWII, but in a totally different guise. Due to controversy with the US over Japanese policies in China, it was decided to build more battleships to attain parity with the US in the Pacific, adopting the 8-8 fleet law calling for eight new battleships and eight new battlecruisers of great size and power to be built by 1922.
In the event, the ‘battleship holiday’, agreed in the spirit of preventing an arms race under the terms of the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty and the 1930 London Naval Treaty, meant that only the first two battleships were completed (Nagato and Mutsu) the agreement restricting capital ships to a US-UKJP ratio of 5:5:3, with a maximum standard displacement of 35,000 tonnes and guns no larger than 16in calibre. Nevertheless, internal political forces resulted in Japan’s renunciation of both treaties in December 1936 on the basis of unfairness. The retained treaty battleships were successively reconstructed under two major modernisation programs, so that by 1938 the Imperial Japanese Navy’s 10 battleships that dated between 1913 and 1921, had been so altered in appearance as to be unrecognisable, yet upgraded to take on anything comparable that America possessed at that time. In 1937, when the Yamato and her four sister-ships were being designed, the Japanese naval planners realised that it was impossible to outbuild the United States numerically at sea, but could do so quantitatively, because the size of American ships was limited by their need to pass through the Panama Canal. During the first six months of the Pacific War the Imperial Japanese Navy enjoyed spectacular success, inflicting heavy defeats on Allied naval forces during the Japanese conquest of Southeast Asia, including the sinking of four US battleships at Pearl Harbor and two Royal Navy capital ships off the east coast of Malaya, ironically not one by surface action. By 1943, American industrial power became apparent and the military forces that faced the Japanese were overwhelming in firepower and equipment, so that by 1945 most of the Imperial Japanese Navy had been sunk with the remnants taking refuse in home waters. The Nagato was the only Japanese battleship that had not been sunk by the United States Navy when the war ended on 2 September 1945. A unique feature of Japanese capital ships was the Pagoda mast, a tower like superstructure erected on a suitably strengthened existing tripod mast of the earlier built battleships, during the late 1920s-1930s capital ship modernisation program. The pagoda mast concept improved a battleship’s fighting performance by incorporating multiple platforms for searchlights, conning positions, light AA guns, rangefinders, gun direction towers, radar arrays, Captain and Admiral bridges, the result resembling a pagoda temple.