Of the five Yamato ships planned, just three ultimately received names - lead ship Yamato herself and sisters Musashi and Shinano.

The IJN also felt that for the Americans to attempt to match such warships and construct similar types through their storied East Coast shipyards, they would have to commit to widening and deepening the Panama Canal for passage into Pacific waters - and this seemed very unlikely. There were plans to reject or delay the ratification of the upcoming naval treaties of 1936 so as to give the IJN enough time to construct their massive ships available for when the tonnage restrictions were set to expire in 1940. Beyond this, however, was in building such grand warships without drawing the attention (and subsequent ire) of both the Americans and the British who both held high levels of interest in their respective Pacific region holdings. The treaties were meant to hamper such thinking but if the participants care little for repercussions of breaking them, then there stood little point in the agreements to begin with. In this fashion, the mighty warships - a total of five originally planned - could move throughout the Pacific realm with impunity and outgun and outlast any opponent that dared to stand in their way.īeyond the engineering challenges of developing these steel beasts were the political ones. Work on the Yamato-class was begun as soon as 1934 and engineers were given the challenge of generating a warship with no equal during the period - armed with powerful main guns, well protected through skillful use of armor plating, and offer performance unmatched for its size. These treaties mainly limited participants to ships of restricted tonnage so as to help thwart another naval arms race like the one that preceded the fighting of The Great War.

Two ships were built to the standard under a high level of secrecy for there were still standing naval treaties that the Empire of Japan had signed onto with after World War 1 (1914-1918). This led to design and development of a new class of surface combatant, one that would eventually lead the IJN to possess the most powerful battleship class in the entire world, the Yamato-class. Knowing that the service would not be able to compete numerically with the American Navy - the prime threat to its expansionist dreams in the region - the IJN adopted a policy of quality over quantity.

The Japanese expansion over the Pacific required a considerable naval force and this was to be directed by the powerful Imperial Japanese Navy arm prior to, and during all of, World War 2 (1939-1945).

Musashi in world of warships