Imperial Japanese Navy

• 1. Introduction

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  The Imperial Japanese Navy rose from almost nothing to become the third most powerful fleet in the world by 1920, then destroyed itself trying to hold an empire it could never afford to keep. At its peak it launched the first purpose-built aircraft carrier ever completed, developed what many historians consider the finest torpedo of the Second World War, and trained pilots who sank British capital ships with aerial strikes that had never been attempted before. How did a nation that had forbidden the construction of ocean-going ships on pain of death for over two hundred years manage all of this? And how did the same navy that humiliated Russia at Tsushima in 1905 end up with most of its surviving warships sunk at anchor in the summer of 1945?

• 2. From Seclusion to Steam

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  Japan's isolation policy began in the 1640s. For more than two centuries the shogunate forbade contact with the outside world and made building ocean-going vessels a capital offense. The one crack in that wall was the Dutch trading post at Dejima in Nagasaki, through which a trickle of Western scientific knowledge, called rangaku, reached Japanese scholars. It was enough to keep Japan aware of cartography, optics, and mechanical sciences even as the country's actual naval traditions withered away.

  Frictions with foreign ships grew from the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Nagasaki Harbour Incident of 1808, the Morrison incident of 1837, and news of China's humiliation in the Opium War forced the shogunate to rethink its reflexive hostility. By 1842 the law ordering foreign ships repelled had been replaced by an edict permitting basic provisions for visiting vessels. Then in 1853 and 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry's American warships entered Edo Bay and made the matter impossible to ignore. The 1854 Convention of Kanagawa opened Japan to international trade, the 1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce followed, and the seclusion era was over.

  The shogunate moved fast. In 1855, with Dutch help, it acquired its first steam warship and opened a Naval Training Center at Nagasaki. Samurai like the future Admiral Enomoto Takeaki were dispatched to the Netherlands to study for years. In 1857 the first screw-driven steam warship was added to the fleet. In 1865, the French naval engineer Léonce Verny was hired to build modern naval arsenals at Yokosuka and Nagasaki. By the mid-1860s, the shogunate had a fleet of eight warships and thirty-six auxiliaries. It was a beginning, however fragile.

• 3. Building a National Fleet

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  The Meiji Restoration in 1868 did not immediately produce a unified navy. The first naval review in Japan, held in Osaka Bay on the 26th of March 1868, gathered six ships from various private domain navies with a combined tonnage of 2,252 tons; a single French Navy vessel that also attended outweighed them all on its own. The Imperial Japanese Navy was not formally established until July 1869, two months after the last combat of the Boshin War.

  For the first two years of the Meiji state no centrally controlled navy existed at all. Domain fleets kept their own ships, and the new government had to borrow naval strength from the powerful Satsuma domain just to suppress the rebel Republic of Ezo that Admiral Enomoto Takeaki had established in Hokkaido after refusing to surrender his ships. Enomoto had escaped north with eight steam warships and 2,000 men. The Imperial side secured the situation only after taking delivery in February 1869 of the French-built ironclad Kotetsu, which the Tokugawa shogunate had originally ordered.

  In 1870 an Imperial decree settled a key question: Britain's Royal Navy, not the Dutch, would be the model for development. In 1873 a thirty-four-man British naval mission arrived under Lieutenant Commander Archibald Douglas, who directed instruction at the Naval Academy at Tsukiji for several years. The mission stayed until 1879 and embedded British traditions in the Japanese navy from seamanship to the cut of its officers' uniforms. Among the sixteen trainees sent abroad in 1871 to study naval sciences, fourteen went to Britain. One of them was the future Admiral Heihachiro Togo.

  Katsu Kaishu, brought into government as Vice Minister of the Navy in 1872, pressed for rapid centralization. The domains were abolished in 1871 and donated their forces to the central government, giving Japan, for the first time, a truly national navy. In February 1872 a separate Navy Ministry was established, and in October 1873 Katsu became its first full minister.

• 4. The French Interlude and Naval Ambition

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  During the 1880s France replaced Britain as the dominant outside influence on the IJN, largely because of the Jeune Ecole doctrine, which favored fast, small ships, particularly cruisers and torpedo boats, over expensive capital ships. The policy shift may also have been shaped by Navy Minister Enomoto Takeaki, who had been a French ally during the Boshin War. There was also a political calculation: Japan was uneasy being dependent on Britain at a moment when Britain was closely aligned with China.

  In 1885 the French Navy engineer Emile Bertin was hired for four years to direct construction at the arsenals of Kure and Sasebo. He supervised the building of more than twenty units, including three cruisers, three coastal warships, two small cruisers, a frigate, an aviso, and sixteen torpedo boats of 54 tons each built in France by the Companie du Creusot in 1888 and assembled in Japan. One of his designs featured the 320 mm Canet gun. Japan acquired its first torpedoes in 1884 and established a Torpedo Training Center at Yokosuka in 1886.

  The push for a major naval expansion had been political as much as military. After the Imo Incident in July 1882, Iwakura Tomomi submitted a document to the ruling council arguing that domestic rebellions were no longer the primary threat and that naval power would confer international prestige. He proposed funding expansion by taxing tobacco, sake, and soy. By March 1883 the navy had secured the 6.5 million yen required annually to support an eight-year plan, adding 32 warships over eight years at a total cost of just over 26 million yen. The budget was the largest the navy had ever secured.

  China was building too, buying two 7,335-ton German-built battleships, Ting Yuan and Chen-Yuan. Japan responded by turning back to Britain, ordering the revolutionary torpedo boat Kotaka in 1887 and purchasing the fastest cruiser in the world at the time, built at the Armstrong works in Elswick, Newcastle upon Tyne, in 1892. In 1886 Japan manufactured its own prismatic powder; in 1892 one of its officers invented the powerful Shimose explosive. The country was moving, step by careful step, from imitation toward independence.

• 5. Tsushima and Its Aftermath

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  The First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 tested the new navy against an enemy that Japan's own naval leadership had quietly feared. Japan's main strategy was swift naval superiority; an early victory over the Beiyang Fleet would let Japan move troops to Korea. On the 17th of September 1894, the Japanese encountered the Beiyang Fleet off the mouth of the Yalu River and crippled it, with the Chinese losing eight of their twelve warships. The remnants were destroyed at Weihaiwei. Under the Treaty of Shimonoseki on the 17th of April 1895, Taiwan and the Pescadores Islands passed to Japan.

  But the two large German-made Chinese ironclad battleships, Dingyuan and Zhenyuan, had proved nearly impervious to Japanese guns. The lesson was clear: Japan needed bigger capital ships. Naval planner Yamamoto Gombei calculated that Japan needed at least six large battleships supplemented by four armored cruisers of at least 7,000 tons to handle the most credible threat, which he identified as Russia. The resulting program, budgeted at 280 million yen over ten years, was largely financed by the indemnity extracted from China, roughly 139 million yen of the total. The bulk of the new ships were built in British shipyards.

  At the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, Admiral Togo led the Japanese Grand Fleet in a decisive engagement that almost completely annihilated the Russian fleet. Out of 38 Russian ships, 21 were sunk, seven captured, and six disarmed. Russian losses were 4,545 killed and 6,106 taken prisoner. Japan lost 116 men and three torpedo boats. The victory triggered waves of mutinies in the Russian Navy at Sevastopol, Vladivostok, and Kronstadt, and the Potemkin uprising in June, which fed into the Russian Revolution of 1905. Tsushima also gave Japan something it had been working toward for thirty years: undisputed recognition as a major naval power.

  Japan's first submarines, purchased from the Electric Boat Company in 1905, arrived barely four years after the U.S. Navy had commissioned its own first submarine. The five Holland Type VII boats were shipped in kit form to Japan in October 1904 and assembled at Yokosuka Naval Arsenal, becoming operational by the end of 1905.

• 6. World War I and the Washington System

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  Japan entered the First World War on the side of the Entente as a consequence of the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance. At the Siege of Tsingtao the IJN achieved a world first: beginning on the 5th of September 1914, the seaplane tender Wakamiya carried out the world's first successful sea-launched air strikes. The very next day, in what was the first air-sea battle in history, a Farman aircraft launched by Wakamiya attacked an Austro-Hungarian cruiser and a German gunboat off Qingdao.

  Following a British request for help and Germany's initiation of unrestricted submarine warfare, in March 1917 Japan sent a force to the Mediterranean consisting of the protected cruiser Akashi as flotilla leader and eight of the navy's newest destroyers under Admiral Sato Kozo. Based at Malta, this formation protected Entente shipping between Marseille, Taranto, and Egyptian ports until the war ended. By the end of the war Japan had escorted 788 Entente transports. The destroyer Sakaki was torpedoed on the 11th of June 1917 by a German submarine, killing 59 officers and men. A memorial at the Kalkara Naval Cemetery in Malta was dedicated to the 72 Japanese sailors who died during the Mediterranean patrols.

  By 1921, naval expenditure had reached nearly 32% of Japan's national budget. At the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, the five powers established tonnage ratios of 5:5:3:1.75:1.75, giving the United States and Britain 525,000 tons each, Japan 315,000, and France and Italy 175,000 each. Japan was also allotted 81,000 tons in aircraft carriers. The treaty also barred Japan from militarizing the Kurile Islands, the Bonin Islands, and several other territories. Naval armament advocates in the Japanese delegation were outraged. But Japanese leadership ultimately concluded that an unequal ratio was better than an unrestricted arms race against the industrially dominant United States. One concession Japan extracted was the preservation of the battleship Mutsu, which had been partly funded by donations from schoolchildren and would otherwise have been scrapped.

• 7. Innovation and Fatal Doctrine

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  Between the wars, the IJN led in several areas that would shape the entire Pacific conflict. In 1921 Japan launched the Hosho, the first purpose-built aircraft carrier in the world to be completed. In 1928 the Fubuki-class destroyers introduced enclosed dual 127 mm turrets capable of anti-aircraft fire and the first torpedo tubes housed in splinter-proof turrets; that design was quickly emulated by other navies. Japan also developed the 610 mm oxygen-fueled Type 93 torpedo, generally recognized as the best torpedo of the Second World War.

  The British Sempill Mission, twenty-seven aviation specialists led by Captain William Forbes-Sempill, arrived at Kasumigaura Naval Air Station in November 1921 and stayed for eighteen months. The mission brought more than a hundred British aircraft representing twenty different models. Japanese pilots trained on the Gloster Sparrowhawk, then a frontline fighter, and Japan went on to order 50 of them from Gloster and build 40 domestic variants. The mission brought plans for HMS Argus and HMS Hermes, which influenced the final stages of Japanese carrier development.

  The doctrine guiding all this hardware was called Kantai Kessen, or decisive battle. It assumed the U.S. Navy would cross the Pacific, be harassed by Japanese submarines along the way, and then be destroyed in a single large fleet action in waters close to Japan. The strategy derived from the geopolitical theorist Alfred T. Mahan and had been refined by Japanese navalist Sato Tetsutaro. It was the basis of Japan's demand for a 70% ratio at Washington and shaped every major construction program that followed.

  The fatal flaw was what the doctrine left out. Japan, almost entirely dependent on imported resources, needed to protect long shipping lanes against enemy submarines. Instead, the IJN under-invested sharply in antisubmarine warfare, both escort ships and escort carriers, and in the training to support convoy protection. The navy also maintained hardly any intelligence agents in the United States when the war began. After the war, several Japanese naval officers cited the lack of information about the U.S. Navy as a major factor in their defeat.

• 8. Pacific War and Dissolution

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  On the 7th of December 1941 the IJN launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403 Americans and crippling the U.S. Pacific Fleet. The first six months brought spectacular results. Japanese naval aircraft sank HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, the first capital ships ever destroyed by aerial attack while underway. In April 1942 the Indian Ocean raid drove the Royal Navy largely out of Southeast Asian waters.

  The reversal came in stages. At the Battle of the Coral Sea Japan was forced to abandon its attempt to isolate Australia. At Midway in June 1942 Japan lost four fleet carriers and most of their experienced aircrew. The monthslong battle of attrition over Guadalcanal from August 1942 to February 1943 compounded those losses. By 1943 the shipbuilding tables told the story plainly: between 1942 and 1945 Japan produced 550,000 tons of warships while the United States produced 3,200,000 tons.

  The Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944 destroyed the bulk of the IJN's carrier pilots, men who were by that point largely irreplaceable. American pilots called the engagement the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot. Four months later, at Leyte Gulf in October 1944, a Japanese attempt to interdict American landings using surface vessels without adequate air cover ended in the destruction of a large part of the surviving Japanese surface fleet. In the final months of the war, the navy resorted to Special Attack Units, the kamikazes.

  In late July 1945, most of the remaining large warships were sunk at anchor by air attacks on Kure and the Inland Sea. By August 1945, a single capital ship was still afloat. Following Japan's surrender, the Imperial Japanese Navy was dissolved in 1945. The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force was formed between 1952 and 1954, under a constitution whose Article 9 specifies that the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation.