IJN-NYK Line Merchant Cruiser Shinano Maru

There have been two ships in Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) service named for the former Japanese province of Shinano.  The more famous of the two was the Yamato-class battleship-turned-aircraft carrier HIJMS Shinano, which was built and sunk during World War II.  The more effective of the two was Shinano Maru, a 6387-ton mixed passenger/cargo ship built by the W. Henderson Company (Glasgow, Scotland) for Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK Line) in 1900.  Its cabins, which could carry up to 238 passengers, were comfortable enough that Shinano Maru was regularly used as a trans-Pacific ocean liner, sailing to the Americas on the Yokohama-Seattle route. 

It survived a 1903 collision with the Canadian Pacific Railway steamship RMS Empress of Japan and was repaired in time to be conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) as a troopship for the Russo-Japanese War.  It ferried thousands of Japanese soldiers to Korea and Manchuria before being pressed into the IJN as a merchant cruiser (armed merchantman) in 1905.  Early in the morning of May 27, Shinano Maru spotted the Russian fleet approaching the Strait of Tsushima and alerted Admiral Togo, who sent his fleet to intercept and eventually sink the Russian ships in the decisive Battle of Tsushima. 

Shinano Maru returned to the NYK Line in 1906, carrying Chinese nationalist leader Sun Yat-Sen (Sun Zhongshan) from China to Japan in 1913, and went through a series of owners before becoming a fish processing factory ship for the Nichiro company.  In World War II, Shinano Maru returned to military service, transporting Japanese troops around Asia and the Pacific.  It was torpedoed and bombed, though not sunk, and was afloat but barely seaworthy by the time it repatriated Japanese prisoners of war from Russia, such as anti-war novelist Shohei Ooka.  Though Shinano Maru was retired in 1951 and scrapped, this model of it as a merchant cruiser aboard the museum battleship HIJMS Mikasa in Yokosuka commemorates its place in history.