Japanese navy aviators, like their army counterparts, preferred maneuverable aircraft, leading to lightly built but extraordinarily agile types, most famously the A6M Zero, which achieved its feats by sacrificing armor and self-sealing fuel tanks.

[1] That year, the commission decided to purchase foreign winged aircraft and to send junior officers abroad to learn how to fly and maintain them.

[2] After their return to Japan at the end of 1912, two of the newly trained naval aviators made the first flights at Oppama on Yokosuka Bay, one in a Curtiss seaplane, the other in a Maurice Farman.

The Japanese, together with a token British force, blockaded then laid siege to the German colony of Jiaozhou and its administrative capital Qingdao on the Shandong peninsula.

During the siege, starting from September, four Farman seaplanes (two active and two reserve) on board Wakamiya conducted reconnaissance and aerial bombardments on German positions and ships.

The aircraft had crude bombsights and carried six to ten bombs that had been converted from shells, and were released through metal tubes on each side of the cockpit.

The bombs landed harmlessly in the mud, but the aircraft were able to confirm that the light cruiser SMS Emden was not at Tsingtao; this was intelligence of major importance to Allied naval command.

Wakamiya conducted the world's first naval-launched aerial raids in history[N 1] and was in effect the first aircraft carrier of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

[10] The mission consisted of 27 members, who were largely personnel with experience in naval aviation and included pilots and engineers from several British aircraft manufacturing firms.

[10] The British technical mission left for Japan in September with the objective of helping the Imperial Japanese Navy develop and improve the proficiency of its naval air arm.

[10] Naval aviators were trained in various techniques such as torpedo bombing, flight control and carrier landing and take-offs; skills that would later be employed in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

[8] In the 1920s, the larger percentage of aircraft that were initially acquired and inducted into service were land based seaplanes whose main tasks were reconnaissance and anti-submarine patrols.

Under the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty two incomplete capital ships were allowed to be rebuilt as carriers, for the Japanese; Akagi and Amagi.

Believing that a major aerial engagement to clear the space over the opposing fleets would precede the final surface battle, they increasingly considered the enemy's carriers as the main targets of naval air power.

[15] Hence, in the early 1930s, the Imperial Japanese Navy adhered to no unified doctrine as to how carriers would be utilized in a fleet action and had no clear vision as to the role of air power in naval warfare.

[17] This was in keeping with the strategy of providing a rapid defense of the home islands against the possible westward advance of an American naval offensive across the Pacific.

In absolute numbers, land-based aircraft provided the largest growth in Japaneses naval air power in the years before the Pacific War.

They were to operate out of six new air stations at Ōminato, Saeki, Yokohama, Maizuru, Kanoya, and Kisarazu in the home islands and Chinhae on the southern coast of Korea.

Under the pressure of the second Vinson plan, initiated by the United States, the Japanese increased the momentum in building up their land-based air forces.

During their early years, these organizations were under the command of able air enthusiasts, who played a major role in the rapid expansion of Japanese naval aviation during the following decade.

[23] On 26 February, six A1N2 fighters from Hōshō, while escorting nine bombers from Kaga on a bombing raid on an airfield at Hangzhou, engaged five Chinese aircraft and shot down three of them.

[23] From the onset of hostilities in 1937 until forces were diverted to combat for the Pacific war in 1941, naval aircraft played a key role in military operations on the Chinese mainland.

[25] The campaign initially began in 1937, taking place largely in the Yangtze River basin with attacks on military installations along the Chinese coast by Japanese carrier aircraft.

Although, the 1937–41 air offensives failed in its political and psychological aims, it did reduce the flow of strategic materiel to China and for a time, improved the Japanese military situation in the central and southern parts of the country.

The bombing of Nanjing and Guangzhou, which began on 22 and 23 September 1937, called forth widespread protests culminating in a resolution by the Far Eastern Advisory Committee of the League of Nations.

The main object seems to be to inspire terror by the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians...»[28]At the beginning of the Pacific war the Imperial Japanese Navy possessed the most powerful carrier force in the world, through combination of excellent ships, well-designed aircraft, and unsurpassed aviators.

[31] During the first six months of the war Japanese naval air power achieved spectacular success and spearheaded offensive operations against Allied forces.

Examination of crashed or captured Japanese aircraft revealed that they achieved their superior range and maneuverability by doing without cockpit armor and self-sealing fuel tanks.

The outdated Japanese aircraft and poorly trained pilots suffered great losses in any air combat for the rest of the war, particularly in the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

The remnants of Japanese naval aviation were then limited to land-based operations, increasingly characterized by kamikaze attacks on American invasion fleets.