List of battlecruisers of Japan

The battlecruiser was an outgrowth of the armoured cruiser concept, which had proved highly successful against the Russian Baltic Fleet in the Battle of Tsushima at the end of the Russo-Japanese War.

In the aftermath, the Japanese immediately turned their focus to the two remaining rivals for imperial dominance in the Pacific Ocean: Britain and the United States.

[1] Japanese naval planners calculated that in any conflict with the U.S. Navy, Japan would need a fleet at least 70 percent as strong as the United States' in order to emerge victorious.

The ships would have had a main battery of ten 16-inch (410 mm) guns, but none were ever completed as battlecruisers, as the Washington Naval Treaty limited the size of the navies of Japan, Britain and the United States.

The four ships were authorised in 1910 as part of the Emergency Naval Expansion Bill, in response to the construction of HMS Invincible by the British Royal Navy.

[11] Designed by British naval architect George Thurston, the first ship of the class (Kongō) was constructed in Britain by Vickers, with the remaining three built in Japan.

Hiei and Kirishima were lost during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal,[14] Kongō was torpedoed on 21 November 1944 in the Formosa Strait,[9] and Haruna was sunk during the Bombing of Kure on 28 July 1945.

The order for these ships and four battleships of the Kii class put an enormous strain on the Japanese government, which by that time was spending a full third of its budget on the navy.

[6] The terms of the February 1922 Washington Naval Treaty forced the class' cancellation, but the two closest to completion (Amagi and Akagi) were saved from the scrappers by a provision that allowed two capital ships to be converted to aircraft carriers.