Aircraft Carriers and Seaplane Carriers
Selected Photos from the Archives of the Kure Maritime Museum; The Best from the Collection of Shizuo Fukui's Photos of Japanese Warships
Robert D Eldridge translator Kazushige Todaka editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Naval Institute Press
Published:31st Dec '19
Currently unavailable, our supplier has not provided us a restock date
The Naval Institute Press will publish the much sought after six volumes of the Kure Maritime Museum's The Japanese Naval Warship Photo Album series. Originally published in Japan in 2005, each album contains photographs officially taken by the Kure Maritime Museum, as well as those taken by private individuals. These pictorial records document the main types of Japanese vessels, from battleships to submarines, based on the best images from Shizuo Fukui, a former Imperial Japanese Navy commander and technician. These photos include the ones Fukui began collecting as a young boy and continued after he worked as a naval shipbuilder, and those that he was given in order to complete a photographic history of the Imperial Japanese Navy's ships, which include those gathered by Nagamura Kiyoshi, a shipbuilder, who among naval engineers especially loved ships and proactively collected photos and the collection of machinist Amari Yoshiyuki. Moreover, with the help of shipbuilder Makino Shigeru among others, Fukui was able to continue to gather photographs and other items throughout the postwar period. It is not an exaggeration, therefore, to say that Fukui dedicated his entire life to this work. These images are especially valuable because of the massive destruction of official documents at the end of the war.
“Aircraft Carriers and Seaplane Carriers is an impressive image repository and a most welcome addition to the English language historiography of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The rendered size and clarity of a majority of the images is impressive, with the earlier glass plate negative pictures offering incredibly sharp levels of detail. The inclusion of gunboats and dispatch vessels alongside the more well know carriers of the IJN further illustrates the variety of vessels built, seized, or converted by the Japanese Navy of 1868 to 1945, and the chronological nature of the layout gives a visual record of design changes and evolutions across both vessel types and some individual vessels as well. For those interested in carriers, gunboats, or dispatch vessels of the Imperial Japanese Navy, this is an excellent visual source for a variety of rare construction, operation, and final disposition images.” —The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord
“This book is remarkable in several respects.... The surviving photographs within are remarkable in that they come from an age where photography in Japan was prohibited near any military installation, shipbuilding facility, or naval port. The photographs in this large and heavy landscape book span full-page, sometimes over two... Highly recommended.” —Nautical Research Journal
ISBN: 9781682474211
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 1161g
240 pages