Kure and the Yamato Museum: Hiroshima's Other History

Kure, half an hour down the coast from Hiroshima, was the Imperial Japanese Navy's principal arsenal — a deep, sheltered harbour ringed by hills, where warships were designed, built and armed.

Its most famous product was the Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, launched here in 1940 and sunk in 1945 on a one-way mission to Okinawa with the loss of most of her crew.

This is the piece of context that reframes the whole region. Hiroshima was a military city — headquarters, port, industry — and Kure was its shipyard. Understanding that does not justify what happened on 6 August; it explains why the city was on the target list, and that is a different and necessary thing to know.

The museum's centrepiece is a 1:10 scale model of the Yamato, 26.3 metres long, sitting in a hall built around it. The scale is what does the work — at a tenth size it is already the length of a house, and the real ship's dimensions become comprehensible in a way that numbers do not manage.

Around it the museum covers shipbuilding technology, the industry that grew here, and the war. It also holds a Zero fighter recovered from the seabed and a *kaiten* human torpedo — a manned suicide weapon — displayed with the names and ages of the men who used them.

It is a technically excellent museum and an uncomfortable one, which is appropriate. It does not celebrate; it displays, at some length, what industrial capacity was turned into.

Directly opposite sits the JMSDF Kure Museum, known locally as the Iron Whale, and it is impossible to miss because a retired submarine sits on land beside the building, out of the water, at full size.

You can walk through it. The interior is preserved — control room, bunks, the corridors you have to turn sideways in — and it is the single best way to understand the scale a submarine crew lives at. Admission is free.

The museum's other subject is minesweeping, which is Japan's postwar naval speciality and a genuinely interesting one. Between the two museums, a couple of hours goes quickly.

Kure is 30 to 40 minutes from Hiroshima Station on the JR Kure Line, and both museums are a few minutes' walk from Kure Station. It is one of the easiest half-days available from the city.

It pairs well with Okunoshima, the rabbit island, which is further along the same line and was itself a secret poison gas facility during the war — a pairing that makes for a very particular kind of day.

One note on tone. This is not an alternative to the Peace Memorial Museum and it should not be treated as a counterargument to it. It is the other half of the same history, and doing both in one trip gives you a far more complete picture of this coast than doing either alone.