Comments by "Bk Jeong" (@bkjeong4302) on "Origins of the Imperial Japanese Navy - Dawn of the Rising Sun" video.

Ironically, one of the biggest role models in the formation of the IJN was Admiral Yi, who would have undoubtedly despised the very idea of the IJN had he been able to see the future. Also, Satsuma isn’t a clan, but a location: it’s the name for the Satsuma domain of the Edo period, and the actual samurai clan in charge were the Shimazu (which still exist and have been there for centuries). Choshu is ALSO not a clan name but a domain name (the actual ruling samurai clan there were the Mori, which also still exist; unlike the Shimazu they started out as a weak clan from elsewhere but then took over as a dominant force during the Sengoku Jidai).
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It gets even more hilarious when you realize the Mori (the actual name of the samurai clan running Choshu) were actually far more navalized than the Shimazu (the actual name of the samurai clan running Satsuma) during the Sengoku Jidai. Ironically enough they never actually fought against each other during the Sengoku Jidai (the Mori were largely finished conquering all of western Honshu by the time the Shimazu began conquering all of Kyushu, and if anything they faced a common enemy in the Otomo clan that dominated northern Kyushu and defended it against the Mori before the Shimazu got to them and took over almost the entire island)
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@ph89787 Agreed, though it should be noted that the Mori actually had a mixed relationship with all three unifiers: there was a brief Mori-Oda alliance (brokered between Motonari and Nobunaga themselves in an exchange of letters) when they had to deal with some minor (and one major) clans between them that were opposed to both, which ended when the Mori switched sides; the resulting Oda campaign against the Mori came to an abrupt halt because Honno-ji happened, and the Mori very quickly became extremely valuable allies to Hideyoshi. Even Ieyasu benefitted massively from the two side branches of the Mori switching sides at Sekigahara while the main branch decided to just sit it out (and block their supposed allies as well while at it)-if he hadn’t rewarded their assistance by taking away over half their lands they might not have decided to overthrow the Shogunate later.
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If Japan had failed to modernize and fallen prey to the Western powers, how would the naval situation in the western Pacific and Indian oceans have developed over the late 19th and the early 20th century?
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@ph89787 Do note that the turtle ships were only a small part of Yi’s fleet (there were 3 built in total as their own squadron: the first being launched literally a few days before the war and the others a few months into the war). The primary capital ships of the Korean fleet at the time were panoeksun (basically turtle ships minus the spiked deck and cannon-mounting dragon prow)
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The IJN and Imperial Japan STARTED OFF militarist and ultranationalist, albeit initially with a colonialist nature similar to European powers (which is more an indictment against said European powers than anything else)
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Except the usual narrative is somewhat wrong, because the Mori (the actual clan in charge of Choshu Domain) and Shimazu (the actual clan in charge of Satsuma-again, that was the name of the place and not the clan) weren’t historically hostile to each other (they never got the chance to during the Sengoku Jidai and even had a major common enemy at that point). The rivalry between their holdings was something that only came about in the Edo period, when they weren’t able to actually go to war against each other for obvious reasons.
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It gets worse when you realize Theodore Roosevelt intentionally screwed over Korea (which he wrongly considered something of a Stone Age society) and let Japan take it as the first significant addition to their empire.
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The pagoda masts were borne from the same causes as the Queen Anne’s Mansions on the QEs; the need to add more new equipment (radios and other communication facilities for battle coordination, optical rangefinders and the systems to connect them to the fire control, the actual fire control on some vessels, etc) to the vantage point of the superstructure, necessitating more superstructure space on pre-existing warships that lacked the room for said equipment. The Japanese in particular decided to build vertically because none of their big-gun capital ships at the time had enough space to expand the superstructure in any other direction. It should also be noted the pagoda mast is a PRE-WWII innovation that only stuck around with older battleships. The two WWII-gen battleships Japan built (the Yamatos) didn’t actually have pagoda masts (they used a tower mast like almost everyone else was doing), because they didn’t need them: they had been built with plenty of superstructure space from the start. This is another example of how the development of the pagoda mast wasn’t connected to Japan’s reliance on optical detection and rangefinding (as far too often argued to have been the case).
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Actually those two clans (which were not named Choshu or Satsuma-those were the names of the places they controlled during the Edo period) weren’t on bad terms with each other until the Edo period.
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Aside from the fact those were the domain names and not the names of the clans in charge of those places….no, they STILL hate each other.
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@themanformerlyknownascomme777 Note that AoN wasn’t an allied-only thing in WWII: the Germans were the odd ones out in that regard (and in most other aspects of capital ship design). Also, the lack of long-range plunging fire was caused in part by the inherent limitations of even radar-guided fire control (such as that some battleships like the Iowas would have been outright incapable of pulling it off in reasonable battle ranges) but in even larger part by the fact battle ranges had become so massively extended much of the time due to carriers being a thing, leading to a lack of gunnery actions (and even fewer actions where you really needed a battleship to take on another battleship)-which is a flaw less with armour layouts and more with the battleship concept as a whole.
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@WALTERBROADDUS No, asking what would happen if that happened.
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The cannon were attached with ropes and tackle so you’d retract them to reload.
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