Ships
- IJN Hosho Captain from 1 November 1926 · Relieved on 1 November 1927
Giichiro Kawamura was a captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy. He commanded the aircraft carrier Hosho from 1 November 1926 until he was relieved on 1 November 1927. The ship had been completed in December 1922 as Japan's first carrier laid down for that purpose, and the small starboard island fitted at completion had already been taken off by the time he came aboard.
She was a compact carrier of about 7,470 tons, good for about 25 knots, with space for roughly fifteen aircraft and a few spares. Four 14-centimeter guns and two high-angle guns sat where they would not block the deck. Hinged funnels were meant to drop clear when aircraft flew. From the first deck landings in 1923 the ship had been working out arresting gear, hangar handling, and the ordinary routine of a flight deck.
Kawamura followed a short line of captains. Jiro Toshima had taken her through fitting out and the opening months in commission. Heizaburo Fukuyo, Ryutaro Kaizu, and Seizaburo Kobayashi held her after that, each for a short tour. Kobayashi turned Hosho over to Kawamura on 1 November 1926. The year that followed was peacetime duty: aircrew training, deck drills, and the fleet exercises in which the navy was still writing its first carrier methods.
For most of the 1920s Hosho had been the only Japanese carrier in service. That changed while Kawamura had her. The much larger Akagi, rebuilt from a battlecruiser hull under the Washington treaty limits, was completed in 1927 and joined the fleet before his tour ended. The smaller ship remained the place where pilots and deck crews learned the work, while the new carrier showed the size of air group the navy meant to keep. Kawamura left Hosho on 1 November 1927.
Kiyoshi Kitagawa, Goro Hara, Hideho Wada, and Eijiro Kondo commanded her in the years just afterward, while she was still a working school of naval flying. Later captains took her into the fighting off China. Rokuro Horie had her during the Shanghai crisis of 1932, and Teizo Mitsunami, Rokukichi Takeda, and Seigo Yamagata followed as the carrier shifted between fleet duty and training. Kawamura's year sits in the quieter stretch before those operations, when Hosho was still teaching the navy how a flight deck worked.