HIJMS Fuji

The first Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) battleship was HIJMS Fuji, a 12,450-ton ship ordered in 1894 and named for Mount Fuji, the tallest mountain in Japan.  She was built at the Thames Iron Works shipyard in Blackwall (London, England) and commissioned in the summer of 1897 so that it could join the fleet review celebrating Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.  Like most early IJN battleships, she was armed with two turrets of twin 12-inch Armstrong-Whitworth naval guns, as well as a mix of smaller guns and torpedo tubes.  She was joined by a sister ship, HIJMS Yashima, and later by more battleships of other classes.

HIJMS Fuji did not enjoy much success in the early days of the Russo-Japanese War.  She was part of the fleet that raided Port Arthur on February 9, 1904.  During this battle, a well-organized Russian defense succeeded in splitting the Japanese fleet's fire, and twelve sailors aboard Fuji were killed or wounded.  Fuji's second assault on Port Arthur was ineffective due to Admiral Nashiba's decision to fire from most of 10 kilometers away, almost out of range of the guns, and not aim before firing.  Her third assault was foiled when Russian admiral Stepan Makarov coordinated coastal-defense guns, warships, and forward observers to mount a counterattack, forcing the Japanese fleet to withdraw.

Japan's first battleship had a bit more luck in combat on April 13, when she was part of Admiral Togo's bait squadron that lured Admiral Makarov's flagship Petropavlovsk into a minefield.  During the Battle of the Yellow Sea in August, HIJMS Fuji did relatively little of note, as HIJMS Mikasa and HIJMS Asahi did most of the fighting.  She finally got lucky near the end of the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, when she fired the shot that set off a powder magazine on the battleship Borodino and destroyed it with an explosive chain reaction, presaging the destruction of HMS Hood by the German battleship Bismarck in World War II.

HIJMS Fuji experienced a fairly quiet career after the Treaty of Portsmouth, hosting American delegates when the U.S. Navy's Great White Fleet passed by Japan in 1908 and then being reassigned to coastal defense in 1910.  She was disarmed and converted into a training/barracks vessel in 1922.  In this capacity, she was docked at the Yokosuka naval base, and was therefore heavily damaged by a carrier-based U.S. Navy air raid on Yokosuka on July 18, 1945.  After the war, the remains of the first Japanese battleship were broken up for scrap.  This model is on display at the Battleship Mikasa memorial museum in Yokosuka.