¹⁄700

Aoshima Models brings out the big guns with the release of two 1/700 waterline Japanese battleships. These two kits, the IJN Mutsu 1943 Katsura Island and the IJN Nagato 1944 Leyte Sea, showcases one of these majestic ships just before her tragic end and the other in her last glorious battle. These kits will retail for $21.35 each and be available at the end of February 2008.

Ships’ History

For those who never heard of the IJN battleship Mutsu, she was named after Mutsu Province, was the Imperial Japanese Navy's second Nagato class battleship, laid down at the Yokosuka Naval Arsenal on June 1, 1918, launched on May 31, 1920, and completed on October 24, 1921.
The Mutsu’s abbreviated battle record had her sailing with Admiral Yamamoto’s Main Body during the Battle of Midway and then mixing it up with the American Navy in the seas off of the Aleutian Islands. But her name is forever remembered not for gun battle in the frozen seas but for the a catastrophic explosion in the number 3 ammunition magazine 3km north of the present-day, Mutsu Memorial on Oshima Island, on June 8, 1943. The explosion was so severe, that it instantly sheared the stern from the ship forward of turret 3 causing major flooding the in the boiler rooms and main engine room. The 535 foot front section of the ship rolled to starboard and sank almost instantly resulting in the loss of over 1,100 officers and men, including 140 instructors and cadets from an aviation training group on a familiarization tour. The stern upended and remained floating for nearly 12 hours before coming to rest just a few hundred feet south of the main wreck. Only 350 survivors were recovered.

The more familiar IJN Nagato was the pride of the Combined Fleet at the beginning of the war in the Pacific, The flagship of both Battleship Division 1 and the Combined Fleet, it was from her bridge that Admiral Yamamoto sent the famous signal Niitakayama nobore 1208 "Climb Mount Niitaka on 12/08 (Japanese Time)" that committed the Carrier Strike Force to the attack on Pearl Harbor and Japan to the Pacific War. She too, sailed with the Main Body at Midway where she returned the survivors of the carrier Kaga to Japan.
Her final blaze of glory came in the waters off Samar with the running gun battle with the brave escorts of Taffy 3. She ended the war as a coastal defense ship to the home islands where here secondary and antiaircraft weapons were moved ashore for what many believed would be the invasion of Japan. On July 18, 1945 the one time pride of the Combined Fleet was reduced to a burning hulk when she was attacked at Yokusuka by fighter bombers and torpedo bombers from Essex, Randolph, Bennington, Shangri-La and Belleau Wood and hit by three bombs, one hitting the bridge and killing her commanding officer, Rear Admiral Otsuka Miki.