"More is more" was a pretty standard design philosophy among Japanese naval architects of the time. It was a way of compensating for the fact that the Japanese industrial base was never going to be up to making as many ships as that of the United States (which even in the '20s was the IJN's principal "hypothetical adversary"). The theory was that Japan's ships would be so much better, it would make up for the fact that they were always going to be outnumbered.

This didn't always work—in the end, thanks to the unexpectedly rapid advancement of naval airpower, it didn't work at all—but that was the idea for nigh on 25 years, and it gave rise to both the ridiculous (Super Kitakami-sama) and the sublime (the Yamato class, which, for all that they were built to win a kind of war that was never going to be fought in the first place, were still straight-up astonishing feats of engineering).

As an aside, it's a real shame neither of the Yamatos survived the war, and not just for sentimental reasons. Because they only existed during wartime, when everyone in Japan had other priorities, there are virtually no good photographs of either one, and I've never found any showing anything inside. Without that, or having one preserved as a museum, it's difficult to get an intuitive feel for just how huge they were. You have to put the numbers next to each other and think about it for a second instead.

For instance: the American South Dakota class was roughly contemporary with the Yamatos—indeed, slightly newer, since they started building in 1939 and Yamato was laid down in 1937. They were modern, heavily armed (nine 16" rifles and the usual slew of secondaries), fast by the standards of the day, and altogether imposing ships. I choose this as my basis for comparison because I've been aboard one, USS Massachusetts (now a museum ship at Battleship Cove in Fall River), and she is not what you would call a little boat. She's 680 feet long and 108 feet abeam, with a standard displacement (that is, nominal displacement calculated with all weapons, ammunition, and stores aboard, but for some reason no fuel) of 35,000 tons.

Yamato was a bit more than 127 feet abeam, and 863 feet long. If you moored her next to Big Mamie, you could park an oligarch's superyacht in the space in front of the American ship's bow and not be able to see it from the other side of Yamato. Her standard displacement was sixty-five thousand tons. You could pile a whole Fusō-class on Massachusetts and still get some change back from that.

They weren't perfect by any means—no weapon system ever is; their citadel armor wasn't as well-designed as its architects thought, nor as well-constructed as it should've been, and too much attention was paid to the wrong threats when designing their defenses, though that last was only evident in hindsight. But man alive, they must've been something to see.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.