Everyone knows how U. S. Navy aviators and submariners sank the three greatest warships ever built. Yamato and Musashi had stalked defiantly across the Pacific before their 120,000 tons and some thousands of their crewmen were sent to Davey Jones. Their sistership, the Shinano, was converted to a super aircraft carrier but was sunk by the U.S.S. Archerfish while on her maiden voyage. Since the war, the world has learned what remarkable ships these three were.
Viewed alongside the ponderous bulk of Yamato, the history of Japanese naval shipbuilding becomes even more interesting than it would normally be. For the nation that produced the largest warships ever built had, only ninety years before, practically no shipyards at all. Then it was even illegal to build seagoing ships in Japan. How did Yamato emerge from such a picture?
The opening of Japan to Western civilization brought about a tremendous wave of industrialization in that hitherto feudal land. And military requirements were at the bottom of most of this activity. Wrote Ushisaburo Kobayashi in 1916: “In this country nearly all of the mechanical industries which apply modern science and arts found their origin in military industry, or else developed under its influence.”
And one of the first industries to develop was warship-building, for “the sight of these huge foreign men-of-war strongly impressed the whole nation with the necessity of sea armament.” As early as 1854 the Japanese, always quick to learn from others, took the ban off seagoing ships and started a few small wooden imitations of Perry’s vessels. But good intentions were no substitute for yards and knowhow; and Japan would have taken a long time to build a fleet, if left to herself. Here the countries of the West stepped in and anxiously offered their services to help her get sea power, little dreaming how it would rebound against them.
These navies donated warships and freely gave experts and advice to help the Japanese build their own naval vessels. They also let the Orientals make extensive purchases in their own shipyards—so extensive that for half a century after Perry’s visit the dragon went to sea in predominantly foreign-built ships. Their first destroyers came from England, and others were copied from them at home. The first Jap subs were built in the United States. And all the early battleships and cruisers came from Europe.
At home things developed slowly. A sample of how it went is offered by the Chiyodagata, first steamer ever built in Japan and of wood and 140 tons. She was begun in 1862 and finished no less than four years later, because “in the course of the work the man in charge often left on a journey, and each time the work had to be suspended.” Then there was the Seiki, an 897-ton gunboat and the first real fighting ship to issue from a Nipponese yard; she took a good three years to build in the seventies. And there was the 4,200-ton cruiser Hashidate, biggest warship built in Japan in that whole half century after Perry; they put her together like an erector set, since her parts were mostly made in France and shipped out to the Orient for assembly.
These jobs and the others like them amounted to little more than practice for the young shipmakers of Japan. From their yards came only a small fraction of their nation’s fighting ships, and they depended on foreign factories for steel and fittings. By 1904 engines of 9,500 H.P. had been made in Japan, and some steel was coming from Japanese mills; but it was all pretty much along experimental lines. Not even a dim outline of Yamato was visible yet; and while the dragon was certainly at sea, and with irresistible force in his claws as far as China and Russia were concerned, it was the West and not the East which put him there.*
Finished with Expedition
The practice and knowledge which the Japanese gained in their early shipbuilding was by far its most important result, far more important than the ships built. They had never been able to work on heavy ships, though, since so much of their materials had to be imported that it cost too much to build them at home in ordinary times. But then came times that were very much out of the ordinary.
When war broke out with Russia in 1904, the Japs were up against it. They wanted replacements and reinforcements for their fleet, and wanted them badly; but all their heavy ships had come from Europe, and those non-belligerents early banned export of warships to the Japanese. This left them with no place to turn for replacements, unless—-
The student shipbuilders of Japan stepped into the gap. If they were novices, they nevertheless had learned well from their Western elders. An emergency program ordering two battleships, four armored cruisers, and 25 destroyers in home yards was drawn up; and these alert beginners marshalled their forces and went to work.
The program was pushed at a furious rate, with no stopping for “the man in charge” to go on trips. The first two armored cruisers were finished in just two years—ships of 14,000 tons and 20,000 horsepower; the other heavy ships didn’t do so well, but the destroyers were “finished with expedition,” most in a year and one in only three months. Those first two cruisers were particularly outstanding products of this unprecedented shipbuilding effort and were good material for Japanese to brag about afterwards.
The feats of those hectic months revolutionized Japanese naval shipbuilding. Then and there they started building their ships at home; except for the Kongo and a few smaller ones, not a warship was built overseas after the war. Circumstances made the yards take over the job of supplying large ships to the navy; prudence made them keep on with it, so that the nation would never be caught short again.
The goal of shipbuilding self-sufficiency was not quite reached, however. While the yards could put ships together, much of the steel and fittings still had to be imported. It is said that 30 per cent of the materials in the famous Haruna, finished in 1915, were bought abroad and merely put together at the yards in Japan. This was gradually improved; the Imperial Iron Works, authorized in 1896, was making steel by the turn of the century, and by 1920 was supplying most of the shipbuilding industry. Other mills, including one heavily financed by English shipbuilders, made up the difference. Meanwhile great gun and armor plate factories had sprung up at Kure, and all the other products needed in men-of-war were available from Japanese factories, for the shipbuilding industry as a whole expanded vastly through a merchant shipping boom during World War I. The result of all this was that by 1920 Navy minister Kato was boasting that all his new warships were 100 per cent Japanese built. Six decades after its beginning, Japanese naval shipbuilding had attained maturity.
A Golden Age
Between world wars the shipyards enjoyed a period of great achievements that was truly their golden age. Japanese shipyards did not sleep between wars, as ours did; far from it. Nippon had large ambitions, and she kept a steady procession of new ships—her “torpedo navy” of cruisers, destroyers, carriers, and subs—coming off the ways. Fine ships they were, in design and construction. The designers drew up plans for some of the best fighting ships in the world; then the yards translated those plans into sturdy realities. And the sturdiest realities of all were the superbattleships Yamato and Musashi.
With the construction of Yamato and her commissioning in December, 1941, Japanese naval shipbuilding truly reached its peak. Half a century before the biggest ship built in Japan was the Hashidate, one-fifteenth Yamato’s size, and her parts shipped in from abroad. Yamato was entirely a Japanese product, even to her unprecedented guns and armor; she was the crowning achievement of Japanese shipbuilding.
Piecework or Mass Production?
As World War II unfolded, the creators of the Imperial Navy found themselves with a load of new, evidently unanticipated problems. They had already proved, so convincingly with Yamalo, that they could build anything, given enough time; only time was suddenly taken away from them. As the powerful fleet they had created was thinned out in action, frantic calls for replacements came from the fighting fronts.
To the program planners one thing that was disagreeably plain was the industry’s inflexibility. In peacetime it did well enough; but the bugles of war did not call it to a spurt in production to match that of its American rival. In 1940 Japanese yards produced three-fifths as much merchant shipping as Americans, and nearly half the tonnage of naval vessels; in 1944, their year of peak production and when U. S. merchant ship production was well down from its peak, the ratios were 1:7 and 1:12, respectively. Worse than these bad ratios was the very real situation that they represented; the Japs simply didn’t get enough ships to fill their needs, while we did. What happened?
Despite its versatility and skill, the Japanese shipbuilding industry emphasized too much craftsmanship and not enough mass production.
Some 60% of the navy’s ships came from private yards, and the rest from four navy yards.* The navy yards were relatively modern, and specialists in their trade; but commercial yards had not specialized— demand was so uncertain that they had to be ready to build anything they could get a contract for—and lacked modern, heavy machinery. Welding and prefabrication were words that played a small part at most yards, where traditional methods were still followed.
Crippled by its technological limitations, the industry was badly hurt by wartime problems; principally, shortages of men and steel.
Actually, manpower wasn’t really scarce, at least until our bombings persuaded many workers to go AWOL; but its value to the yards was another matter. The army and navy started drafting off skilled workers, especially in commercial yards; to replace them, and get the needed expansion of the labor force, the yards got boys, prisoners of war, and great numbers of Japanese 4-F’s.
Then steel bit down, and with it oxygen needed badly for welding and cutting. Lack of facilities, lack of modern techniques, lack of skilled workmen, lack of materials— these all combined to bedevil the industry.
The remedies which they tried were not very successful. The Japanese turned to smaller, weaker ships, which saved steel, were quicker to build, and were easier for the unskilled labor to put together. A more common solution was just to ignore one program to push production of another.
The yards, despite all these harassments, did step up production substantially. In 1944, their peak year, they turned out over five times as much as in 1940. Yet they failed; and the blame must lie on the government which did not take steps to enlarge and modernize its shipbuilders before the war.
But that story may not be finished for all time. On October 8, 1949, Trade Minister Heitaro Inagaki announced in Tokyo that thirty new 8,000-ton merchantmen were to be built to revive Nipponese overseas commerce. If Japan is once more to become a maritime nation, sooner or later a navy is certain to come into being.
The first fleet after Perry was one of spitkits, gotten from 1854 to 1868; of 138 ships, mostly noncombat types, only 25 were Japanese built. Then there was the fleet authorized in the 1880’s, counterpart in time and spirit of our “Great White Fleet”; about half of its ships were built at home, but they were the smaller ones. The third great fleet obtained before the Russo- Japanese War was authorized in 1896, and quadrupled the navy’s strength; only a small portion of it came from Japanese yards, and they were the smallest ships. Battleships built abroad to 1904-7; at home, 0. Cruisers built abroad, 20; at home, 5.
The navy yards producing ships were at Yokosuka, Kure, Sasebo, and Maizuru. The first two accounted for 80% of production in navy yards during the war, and almost a third of all naval shipbuilding; they dated from the nineteenth century, Yokosuka being the parent yard of the modern Japanese navy. Among private yards, Mitsubishi at Nagasaki was in their class. These “big three” accounted for roughly 15% of total naval building apiece; nine private and navy yards built 3 to 6% each, while fifteen other private yards brought up the rear with a mere 10% among them.