Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/February 2019/Review essay
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How not to preserve a battleship: a visit to the Mikasa |
- By Nick-D
The Mikasa Preservation Society claim that the Japanese battleship Mikasa is "One of Three World-Renowned Historic Memorial Warships", alongside USS Constitution and HMS Victory. On the basis of a recent visit to the Mikasa at Yokosuka in Japan, I don't agree.
Preserving any warship is a complex and expensive task, and Mikasa's stewards have been dealt a particularly difficult hand. Not only is the pre-dreadnought battleship more than 100 years old, she was reduced to little more than a shell under the terms of Japan's surrender in 1945. That she exists at all is a credit to everyone concerned. But this doesn't make her a particularly successful museum ship.
I've had the good fortune to have visited Constitution and Victory, and they are simply in a different league to Mikasa. Both remain commissioned vessels, and are in remarkable condition. Constitution is still afloat, and Victory sits in a dry dock. Visitors touring the ships can gain quite deep insights into how they operated, and the lives of their crews. Both ships are presented as part of serious and scholarly museums, and are staffed by knowledgeable guides (though the US Navy crew of Constitution were openly telling people when I visited how much they were looking forward to a more interesting posting!).
In contrast, Mikasa sits in concrete in a depressing seaside park. Her partial restoration in the 1950s was clumsily done, with the main gun turrets and side barbettes being obvious fakes. For instance, most of the side barbettes are simply flat pieces of metal with a fake gun sticking out from them: models of the ship show that the original barbettes had hinged shields, which could be retracted to allow the guns to be aimed. Almost nothing remains of the ship's internal fit-out, with her engines being long gone and visitors being presented with a set of fairly large rooms inside the hull which obviously bear little resemblance to the original design. The displays inside the ship include some interesting items, but the captions present a Japanese nationalist perspective on the Russo-Japanese War (falsely claiming that Russia started the war, for instance) which damages the credibility of the Mikasa as a museum.
So, should travelers to Japan visit Mikasa? In short, maybe. Reaching Yokosuka from Tokyo is straightforward, and I found it easy to include a visit to the city in a day trip to the nearby historic town of Kamakura due to the excellent railway network. As the only remaining pre-dreadnought, Mikasa should be of interest to military history nerds, and enough of the ship remains to get a feel for how she looked externally during her naval career. But visitors should arrive with fairly modest expectations, and not expect to see a particularly good naval museum.
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