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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday, August 13, 2025:  A Long-Lived Tyne Built Ship

Above, we see the fine Armstrong-built Asama-class armored cruiser Tokiwa of the Imperial Japanese Navy photographed in 1899 with a bone in her teeth.

Amazingly, this indomitable warship would serve nearly a half-century and be lost during her fifth war for the emperor, some 80 years ago this week.

The Asamas

The late 19th/early century Imperial Japanese Navy was very European in construction. Ten out of ten battlewagons carrying the Rising Sun flag against the Russians in 1904 were built in the yards of Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Vickers in Britain.

Of the Emperor’s armored cruisers, Izumo and her sister Iwate came from Armstrong, Yakumo hailed from the German yard of AG Vulcan, Kasuga and Nisshin from Ansaldo in Genoa, and Azuma from Ateliers et Chantiers de la Loire in France. Ordered in 1897 alongside these six cruisers were another pair based on an improved design of the Chilean O’Higgins.

Sir Philip tweaked the one-off O’Higgins design to add more armor protection (2,100 tons all told) and horsepower to carry it all. Instead of a belt that maxed out at seven inches and the eight-inch CT, this new design rocked as much as 14 inches. It also used extensive compartmentalization with 163 watertight compartments, 32 of which were in the double bottom. This added 1,200 tons to the displacement and stretched the hull to 442 feet. The powerplant dropped the forest of 30 boilers seen on the Chilean ship for a dozen larger single-side cylindrical boilers and upped the ihp to 18,000 to keep the same (or better) speed.

Paid for out of a Chinese indemnity given to Japan as part of the spoils of the 1895 war, these two ships would be named Asama and Tokiwa, after traditional regions in the Empire.

The weaponry would also be stepped up a bit from O’Higgins.

While the Chilean ship carried four EOC 8″/40 Pattern T guns in single mounts, the new Asamas would carry two pairs of improved EOC 8″/45 Pattern U (41st Year Type in Japanese service) guns, the same type which would go on to be carried by the rest of Japan’s armored cruisers as well as the post Russo-Japanese War domestically built Ibuki-class armored cruisers. These were protected by six inches of armor over their gun houses and were serviced by electric hoists from the magazines.

The secondaries on the Asamas were also beefed up, from the 10 6″/40 QF EOCs on O’Higgins in five-inch turrets and casemates to 14 guns with 10 in casemates and four in single shielded mounts. Tertiary anti-boat armament included a dozen 3″/40 Armstrongs and seven 47/30 2.5-pounder Hotchkiss (Yamauchi) guns. Torpedo batteries included a 450mm tube in the bow and four on the beam. Likewise, two of her steam punts could be equipped with spar torpedoes.

Meet Tokiwa

Laid down on 6 January 1898 at Elswick as Yard No. 662/armored cruiser No. 4 (her sister Asama was No. 661), Tokiwa took to the water on 6 July 1898 and was commissioned on 19 May 1899. She made a mean 23 knots on her speed trials.

On 19 May 1899, with Captain (later Admiral) Dewa Shigeto in command, Tokiwa left Britain for Yokosuka, completing the 11,000nm voyage in a handy 57 days– a heck of a shakedown cruise.

War (with China)!

Rated as a first-class cruiser, Tokiwa was dispatched on 19 June 1900 to join the Eight-Nation Alliance naval forces in Chinese waters during the Boxer Rebellion. While arriving around the time of the assault against the Taku Forts, she was not used in the assault there, standing by offshore with a dozen other large, allied vessels as smaller gunboats closed in for the work.

However, landing forces from the Japanese ships sent 329 armed sailors ashore to help storm and garrison the forts.

While 54 Japanese marines were dispatched as part of Admiral Seymour’s overland relief expedition to Peking, I can’t say whether any of those came from Tokiwa.

Tokiwa returned to Kure on 20 August.

War (with Russia)!

Clustered with the armored cruisers Izumo, Iwate, Azuma, Yakumo, and Asama, along with the dispatch boat Chihaya, Tokiwa formed the 2nd Squadron under VADM Kamimura in 1903. This force proved a key left hook to the right cross of Togo’s 1st Squadron during the war against the Tsar.

Captain Shigetaro Yoshimatsu became Tokiwa’s eighth skipper on 19 January 1904. A professional officer who graduated from the Naval Academy in 1880, he had studied in France and England and fought as a gunnery officer on the second-class cruiser Yoshino during the 1894 war with China. He had been XO on Tokiwa’s sister Asama when she took part in the 1902 Spithead naval review celebrating the coronation of King Edward VII.

Offshore for the initial torpedo boat attack on the sleeping Russian anchorage at Port Arthur on 8 February 1904, she managed a few 8-inch shells lofted when the Russians sortied out the following morning, and thus began the blockade and later siege of that fortress city that would prove the hub on which the conflict revolved.

It was off that port that Tokiwa almost captured the Russian destroyer Steregushchiy in March and participated in rebuffing Marakov’s 13 April sortie that ended in his death upon the sinking of his flagship via mines.

Relieved from the Port Arthur blockade in the summer 1904 to chase down a raiding trio of Russian armored cruisers (Rossia, Gromoboi, and Rurik) out of Vladivostok, Tokiwa, along with the armored cruisers Iwate, Izumo, and Azuma and protected cruisers Takachiho and Naniwa, finally clashed with the Russian cruisers off Ulsan on the early morning of 14 August. With the Russians outnumbered six hulls to three, the six-hour swirling artillery duel turned brutal, and Rurik was sunk, taking some 200 of her crew with her, while the severely damaged Rossia and Gromoboi managed to limp away.

Tokiwa landed some blows against Rossia and was slightly damaged by return fire, with three of her crew injured.

Then, following the collapse of Port Arthur, came the Valkyrie ride of VADM Rozhestvensky’s 2nd Pacific (1st Baltic) Squadron through the straits of Tsushima. Tokiwa was there.

During the battle, Tokiwa and her squadron engaged the Russians several times, most notably in the destruction of the 14,000-ton Peresvet-class battleship Oslyabya.

When the smoke cleared, Tokiwa had suffered eight hits, mostly from smaller caliber shells, resulting in 15 casualties.

Post-war, she was a darling of the fleet, being chosen to escort Crown Prince Yoshihito (later Emperor Taisho) on his tour of Yamaguchi and Tokushima Prefectures in 1908.

The same year, she participated in the 1908 Kobe Fleet Review.

In 1910, both Asama and Tokiwa had their well-worn set of British boilers replaced with 16 more efficient 16 Miyabara boilers as part of a general mid-life refit.

War (with the Kaiser)!

When the Great War kicked off, British-allied Japan soon got involved in the rush to capture (and keep) Germany’s overseas colonies. As part of this, on 18 August 1914, she was assigned to the 4th Squadron along with Iwate and Yakumo, part of VADM Sadakichi Kato’s 2nd Fleet, detailed to blockade and seize the German treaty port of Tsingtao, an operation that began on the 27th of that month and stretched into early November.

She was then dispatched to scour the West Pacific– along with other allied assets– in the attempt to run down Graf Spee’s East Asiatic Squadron. Once Spee was sent to the bottom along with most of his squadron in December and the last of his cruisers (SMS Dresden and the Hilfkruezer Prinz Eitel Friederich) were accounted for the following March 1915, the pressure eased and our aging cruiser was allowed to spend the rest of the war in a series of more pedestrian tasks, including a series of Grand Maneuvers.

She became active in a series of globetrotting training cruises, carrying naval academy cadets. This included the 44th class cadet training cruise to the U.S. with Yakumo from 5 April to 17 August 1917. A second cadet training cruise for the 46th class with Azuma from 1 March to 26 July 1919 jogged south to Australia. Azuma and Tokiwa teamed up for a third cruise with the 47th class that roamed to the Mediterranean from 24 November 1919-20 May 1920.

Treaty rebuild

By 1921, both Asama and her sister Tokiwa, too slow for fleet operations, were reclassified as coast defense vessels. At the same time, many of Japan’s old armored cruisers were disarmed as part of the Naval Limitation Treaties, and their weapons were reduced.

The 8″/45s removed from Tokiwa and her fellow armored cruisers in the 1920s were recycled for use as coastal artillery, including two twin turrets at Tokyo Bay, four single guns mounted at Tarawa, and another four at Wake Island.

Between 30 September 1922 and 31 March 1923, Tokiwa was converted to a cruiser minelayer. In this, she landed her rear 8″/45 turret, her torpedo tubes, six of her 6″/40s, and all her obsolete 3-inch and 2.5-pounders. She then picked up accommodation for 300 mines on deck tracks for over stern sowing. A similar conversion was done to the old armored cruiser Aso (ex-Russian Bayan).

It was in this mine role that, on 1 August 1927, while training with mines in Saeki Bay, Kyushu, after returning from overseas service in China during the Shandong Intervention, Tokiwa suffered from an explosion that left 35 dead and another 65 injured. Through a combination of magazine flooding and assistance from nearby vessels, a complete disaster was avoided, and she was quickly repaired and returned to service.

The incident led to the redesign of the No. 5 Kai-1 mine to install safety features and a further redesign of several classes of new Japanese light and heavy cruisers to better handle damage.

War (with China, again)!

Once repaired, Tokiwa spent most of the next decade in Chinese waters and frequently landed her sailors and marines for strongarmed use ashore, especially after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.

She returned home in 1937 to have her 16 Miyabara boilers, which had been installed in 1910, replaced by 8 Kampon boilers, reducing her speed to 16 knots. During this refit, she hung up the pretext of being a cruiser, and remaining 8″/40s and 6″/40s were removed. This allowed for her mine storage to be bumped to 500 “eggs”, and she had a couple of 40mm and 10 twin 25mm AAA guns installed. Likewise, by this time, her sister Asama had been converted into a training ship.

Tokiwa was on hand in Yokohama Bay with 98 other IJN ships in October 1940 for the largest (and last) grand fleet review in Japanese history.

War (with the Allies)!

On 29 November 1941, Tokiwa sailed from Truk as part of Operation “GI,” the invasion of the British Gilbert Islands, which began on 8 December (Japan time).

The following January, Tokiwa was part of Operation “R,” -the Invasions of Rabaul, New Britain, and Kavieng.

She felt her first Allied sting in a carrier raid at Kwajalein in February from USS Enterprise. Damaged in four near misses from 500-pound bombs, she suffered eight killed and 15 wounded. This sent her to Sasebo for three months of repairs.

Dispatched to respond to the Marine Raiders’ sweep of Makin Island in August 1942, she managed to pull quieter duty for (most of) the rest of the war, narrowly avoiding torpedoes from USS Salmon (SS-182) in 1943 on her way back to the Home Islands. There, she led a minelaying squadron (the 18th Sentai) that sowed over 6,000 mines.

Striking a mine off the Hesaki lighthouse in the Kanmon Strait in April 1945, Tokiwa put into Sasebo again for repairs and added another 10 25mm guns, giving her a final fit of 30 of these weapons (some reports state 37). She also had depth charge racks and throwers installed along with a Type 3 sonar and was fitted with primitive (2-shiki 2-go and 3-shiki 1-go) radars.

After laying minefields in her old 1905 stomping grounds in the Tsushima Strait, she was ironically damaged by a B-29-sown aerial mine on 3 June 1945 off Maizuru harbor. The damage was slight, and she left Maizuru after makeshift repairs for Ominato. In all, between 24 January 1944 and 30 June 1945, she laid 17 series of anti-submarine minefields in Japanese waters.

Five elderly (and mostly disarmed) Russo-Japanese war era cruisers were still afloat in Japanese home waters in the last days of the war: the everlasting sisters Asama and Tokiwa, along with Yakumo, Izumo, and Iwate. All were pummeled by American and British carrier-borne aircraft strikes in late July and early August 1945, with three of the five damaged so extensively they bottomed out in shallow water.

It was at Ominato that Tokiwa was caught by aircraft from USS Essex and Randolph on the afternoon of 9 August. She suffered at least four direct bomb hits and at least that many near misses, crippling the ship and killing or wounding half of her crew. Towed to shallow water off Cape Ashizaki, she was beached, and her crew attempted repairs.

With the end of hostilities, her crew was relieved on 20 September, and she was removed from the Naval List on 30 November.

All these battered old bruisers were unceremoniously scrapped shortly after the war, and only one, Tsushima veteran Yakumo, ever sailed again under her own power– as an unarmed repatriation transport to bring 9,000 Japanese troops home from KMT-occupied Formosa in 1946.

Epilogue

Today, there are few remains of Tokiwa despite her nearly 50 years (okay, 46 years, 11 months, 17 days) of service.

Between 3 October 1898 and 20 September 1945, she had 52 skippers. At least seven of these became admirals.

These included her Russo-Japanese War skipper, Capt. Shigetaro Yoshimatsu, who went on to become a full admiral and the sixth commander of the Combined Fleet (Rengo Kantaishireichokan) in November 1915, a post he held through October 1917.

Another was Naoma Taniguchi, who, after serving as Tokiwa’s skipper in 1916-17, rose to become a full admiral and commander of the Combined Fleet, then Chief of the Naval General Staff in the early 1930s. Head of one of the IJN’s more rational factions, he was instrumental in the ratification of the Treaty of London and later refused to send ships to respond to the Manchurian Incident. For this, he and his deputy officers were forced into retirement in 1933, leaving more hawkish officers in charge. He passed soon after.

Then there was the Viscount Ogasawara, who translated Mahan into Japanese in 1899, served as Togo’s aide, and wrote several popular works on the Russo-Japanese war at sea, one of which was turned into a movie in 1930. Ogasawara later served as the director of the school that educated then Crown Prince Hirohito and, moving to the retired list in 1921 as a vice admiral, became a naval advisor to the throne through November 1945.

In 1989, the Japanese government recycled the name of the old cruiser for a new Towada-class replenishment ship (AOE-423). The Hitachi SC built vessel almost immediately clocked in on one of modern Japan’s first overseas naval deployments– Desert Shield/Storm, now some 35 years in the rearview. The oiler delivered non-combatant material to Saudi Arabia as part of Japan’s contribution to the coalition effort and has been a familiar consort to allied vessels underway in the WestPac in the past few decades.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

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