Light Cruiser Kitakami (Torpedo Cruiser)

Kitakami (北上) was a Kuma-class light cruiser of the Imperial Japanese Navy, laid down on 1 September 1919 at Sasebo Naval Arsenal, launched on 3 July 1920, and commissioned on 15 April 1921. Named after the Kitakami River in Iwate Prefecture.

Kitakami's claim to fame is her 1941 conversion into a torpedo cruiser (重雷装巡洋艦, jūraiso junyōkan). Along with her sister ship Ōi, she was fitted with ten quadruple 61 cm torpedo launchers (40 tubes total), making her the most heavily torpedo-armed warship ever constructed. The concept was to create a ship that could unleash a devastating wall of Long Lance torpedoes in a decisive fleet battle. However, this radical concept proved impractical — the ship was top-heavy, the reloading process was dangerously slow, and the massed tubes made her extremely vulnerable to enemy fire.

In August–September 1942 the torpedo armament was cut back to 24 tubes and Kitakami was converted to a fast transport. On 27 January 1944 she was hit aft by two torpedoes from the British submarine HMS Templar southwest of Penang and had to be towed in. After repairs at Singapore and then Sasebo, she was further converted from August 1944 into a kaiten (human torpedo) carrier capable of launching eight kaiten.

Kitakami was one of only a handful of major Japanese warships to survive the entire war. Damaged by strafing in the Kure area on 24 July 1945, she served after the surrender as a repair tender for repatriation ships at Kagoshima and was scrapped at Nagasaki between August 1946 and March 1947.