She was completed in 1929 by the Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyards and was in regularly scheduled service between Kobe and Osaka in Japan and the port of Dairen in the Kwantung Leased Territory on the Asian mainland.

Her civilian career was relatively uneventful, although she was damaged in Osaka by a typhoon in 1934 [1] In 1937, after the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Ural Maru was requisitioned by the Imperial Japanese Army and converted into a hospital ship from 13 October 1937 to February 1938, returning sick and wounded soldiers from the front back to Japan.

Ural Maru was briefly returned to commercial service, but was requisitioned again by the Imperial Japanese Army in November 1941, and used primarily as a military transport to carry troops and military supplies from the Army’s primary staging area of Hiroshima in Japan to various ports in southeast Asia, including Manila, Saigon, Singapore, Rabaul, Rangoon and Palau in the initial stages of the war.

On her last voyage, Ural Maru had departed Singapore bound for Takao in Taiwan and had called on Kuching and Miri in Japanese-occupied Sarawak, where she loaded Japanese wounded, nurses and a number of "comfort women".

[3] Ural Maru was torpedoed in the South China Sea and sunk on 27 September 1944 by the American submarine USS Flasher (SS-249) approximinately 240 kilometres (150 mi) west of Luzon at coordinates (15°40′N 117°18′E / 15.667°N 117.300°E / 15.667; 117.300)[4]