I am none to sure what Maru stands for, at a guess I'd say something about the sea or moving water and the such like, what I do know is, there are several, lot's and lot's of ships that end in the name of Maru, I have 4 so far, 3 for Xmas and one I am now building called Heian Maru, which was a depot ship, submarine tender, a work horse before being sent to the botom of the sea, there are a host of camo, straight grey's and split light and dark grey.
Just asking if there was a special section in English for this subject, I did find a huge site but all in Japinese, look forward to your reply, almost forgot to mention, I know I could use the translator, but I'd rather simply read about these oiler, seaplane, submarine, supply types in English then backward and forward into the translator, thank you.

I've always been under the understanding that it just meant "ship." While the western world might talk about the "SS" Titanic or "SS" Minnow, the Japanese might have called it the Titanic Maru. I've never seen it applied to warships, but I don't know if that's a Japanese thing or if western authors have stuck "IJN" on the front of warships after our own military traditions and it should actually be the Yamato Maru... maybe someone way smarter than me about this topic can educate me on that too.

(I did see an interesting post... I can't remember where... heck, it might even have been here... where someone pointed out that "IJN" isn't really correct anyway. We use DKM when we speak of German ships, but for some reason we translate the prefix to English when we're talking about the Japanese.)

Maru means "circle" and also "whole". Ship is "fune".

Wiki says:

The word maru (丸, meaning "circle"?) is often attached to Japanese ship names. There are several theories associated with this practice.

* (The most common): That ships were thought of as floating castles, and the word referred to the defensive "circles" or maru that protected the castle.
* That the suffix -maru is often applied to words representing something that is beloved, and sailors applied this suffix to their ships.
* That the term maru is used in divination and represents perfection or completeness, or the ship as a small world of its own.
* A legend of Hakudo Maru, a celestial being that came to earth and taught humans how to build ships. It is said that the name maru is attached to a ship to secure celestial protection for it as it travels.
* For the past few centuries, only non-warships bore the maru ending. It was intended to be used as a good hope naming convention that would allow the ship to leave port, travel the world, and return safely to home port: hence the complete circle arriving back to its origin unhurt.

Today commercial and private ships are still named with this convention.

The first ship known to follow this convention was the Nippon Maru, flagship of daimyo Toyotomi Hideyoshi's 16th century fleet.

Thank you for a fast response, and some really good sounding answers.

Great information. I've only heard of non-combat ships (tankers and cargo) with the MAru in the name

I believe the Navy was called Nihon Kaigun Looking at model kits made by Japanese countries I only saw IJN written once