Kure Naval History: The Yamato Museum and a Submarine You Can Walk Inside in Hiroshima

Kure is half an hour from Hiroshima and almost nobody on the Peace Park circuit goes there, which is a shame, because it explains a great deal about why Hiroshima was a target in the first place. This was one of Japan's four principal naval arsenals and the yard that built the Yamato — the largest battleship ever constructed, 263 metres long, with 46-centimetre guns that remain the biggest ever fitted to a warship.

The Yamato Museum is built around a 1:10 scale model of her, twenty-six metres of it, assembled with a level of detail that takes a while to absorb. Around it sit real artefacts, the engineering story of how a country that had barely industrialised in 1868 was building ships like this by 1940, and — treated seriously rather than skirted — what happened to her and the 3,000 men aboard when she was sunk in 1945 on a one-way mission to Okinawa.

Across the road is the JMSDF Kure Museum, known as the Iron Whale. A decommissioned submarine, the Akishio, sits on land beside the building, and you go inside it: the control room, the bunks stacked between machinery, the corridors you turn sideways to pass through. Understanding submarine service is a matter of standing in one, and very few places let you.

The walk also takes in the harbour viewpoints, where the modern Maritime Self-Defense Force fleet is usually visible at its moorings.

A guide matters here because the museums label heavily in Japanese and the context — industrial, military and moral — is what turns the visit into something more than looking at models. Groups cap at fifteen.