Navy

“The first time I set foot aboard the Yamato, I remember looking up at the bridge in awe — it towered over us like a skyscraper.”

Built in 1905 as the official residence of the Kure Naval Commander-in-Chief.

The world’s largest and most powerful battleship, the Yamato, was built in Kure, and here you can see a 1/10th scale model of it, along with other large exhibits such as the Zero fighter (kamikaze plane), and Kaiten (human torpedo).

Established in 1890 during the Meiji era as a cemetery for navy personnel, this somber place also contains tombs of British sailors, individual monuments, and monuments to the war dead from the battleship Yamato.

Kawachiya (now Miyakehonten), founded in 1856, started making sake in 1902, the same year that Kure became incorporated as a city.

Navy sailors who disembarked at Kure often whiled away shore leave at the facility depicted in this scene of the animated film In This Corner of the World.

At military ports like Kure where many battleships congregated, gunpowder was color-coded so each ship’s gunners could identify where their shots landed. In this dramatic scene from In This Corner of the World, Suzu witnesses these colored bursts during an air raid, and envisions paint daubs in the sky.

In WWII, 7-8 meter tall “blindfold fences” were built along the Kure Rail Line to hide the shipyards during the construction of the Battleship Yamato, as seen in the animated film In This Corner of the World.