Every Japanese Battleship Ever Built: 1878–1945

Japan built the two largest battleships in history, and they spent most of the war at anchor. The ships that did Japan's fighting were four battlecruisers ordered from Britain in 1911 — worn out, thirty years old, and sent into night actions the newer ships were considered too valuable to risk. This is every battleship the Imperial Japanese Navy ever owned: 25 built and 7 captured, from a small iron-hulled ship bought on the Thames in 1878 to a 64,000-ton giant whose guns were a state secret. Along the way: the two ships lost to a single minefield in one morning in 1904, the loss Tokyo concealed for over a year, the six Russian battleships Japan took at Tsushima — two of which it later sold back to Russia — the ship that carried a future Emperor to Europe, the battleships rebuilt with flight decks that never flew an aircraft in combat, and the last time in history that battleships fought each other. Thirty-one of the thirty-two are gone. One is still there, set in concrete at Yokosuka, and you can walk aboard her today. 0:00 Thirty-Two Battleships 0:42 Part One — Fuso & Chin'en: The Ironclad and the Prize (1878) 3:14 Part Two — Fuji Class: Britain Builds Japan a Navy (1897) 5:38 Part Three — Shikishima Class: Ninety Seconds (1900) 7:20 Part Four — Asahi: The Battleship That Became a Salvage Ship (1900) 8:53 Part Five — Mikasa: The Only One Left (1902) 11:41 Part Six — The Russian Prizes: Six Battleships Japan Did Not Build (1905) 14:46 Part Seven — Katori Class: The Last Ships Japan Bought (1906) 16:31 Part Eight — Satsuma Class: The All-Big-Gun Ship That Wasn't (1910) 18:03 Part Nine — Kawachi Class: Japan's First Dreadnoughts (1912) 20:22 Part Ten — Kongo Class: The Old Ships That Did the Fighting (1913) 24:32 Part Eleven — Fuso Class: Into the American Line (1915) 27:16 Part Twelve — Ise Class: The Battleships With Flight Decks (1917) 29:34 Part Thirteen — Nagato Class: The Flagship That Outlived the Empire (1920) 32:13 Part Fourteen — The Cancelled Generation: The Ships the Treaty Killed (1922) 34:26 Part Fifteen — Yamato Class: The Largest, and the Least Used (1941) 38:19 Epilogue — The Reckoning