Vol. 65, No. 4 winter 2020
378 T is book is fi lled with design detail that the hard- core naval engineering student will fi nd interesting
and informative, but the action sequences bring these pages to life. As a ship modeler, I appreciated the many photographs I had not seen before, but would have liked some of them to be a little bigger, with some color added as well. I would also like to have seen some deck plans. Overall, the book was satisfactory and presented new information about these ships that was both informative and fascinating. Recommended!
Rick Cotton Katy, Texas
T e book was fi rst published by the Kure Maritime Museum in 2005 and in the Japanese language. T e museum is located in Hiroshima, Japan, and is commonly known as the Yamato Museum. T e purpose of the museum is to tell the story of the Kure Naval Arsenal and related technologies and boasts a 1:10 scale model of the super battleship Yamato which is 26.3 meters in length.
Upon opening in 2005 the Museum decided to publish six volumes in a series on Japanese naval warships which portrayed the types of vessels the nearby naval yard produced. T is, then, is one volume of the series that includes aircraſt carriers, seaplane carriers but also includes gunboats (some captured from the United States, British, and Italian navies), and dispatch vessels. Some of the photographs date back to 1888, but the majority are from the twentieth century and are primarily of World War II vintage.
Aircraſt Carriers and Seaplane Carriers: T e Japanese Naval Warship Photo Album
Edited by the Kure Maritime Museum and Kazushige Todaka
Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2019 11 3/4” x 8 ½”, hard cover, 235 pages US $75.00.
T is book is remarkable in several respects. First, it is remarkable that we have it at all. Next, the surviving photographs within are remarkable in that they come from an age when photography in Japan was prohibited near any military installation, shipbuilding facility, or naval port. Last, the photographs in this large and heavy landscape book span full-page, sometimes over two. So, what do we have here?
T e photographs are generally sharp, having been made from original glass plates, and depict the vessels in port and underway. Some photographs are less than optimal due to weather conditions or the press of combat, but overall this book is a grand visual treat for enthusiasts of the Japanese Navy. Since the photographs take up the bulk of the book, this being primarily a photographic album, there is little text. What is provided is a brief caption for each photo with the “date, what, and where.” To balance the lack of text there resides at the end of the book some twenty-seven pages of specifi cations of the vessels with a brief history of each.
T e photographs in the main come from the collection of Shizuo Fukui who devoted his entire life to this work, preserving it for posterity. T e book was edited by the museum and by Kazushige Todaka, the director of
the Kure Maritime Museum. T e English language version was translated by Robert D.
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