Ships
- IJN Nagatsuki Captain from 15 October 1940
- IJN Asagumo Captain from 9 June 1943
Kazuo Shibayama was a lieutenant commander in the Imperial Japanese Navy who spent the Pacific War in command of destroyers. He became captain of Nagatsuki on 15 October 1940. On 9 June 1943 he became captain of Asagumo, and he was still her commanding officer when she was lost in Surigao Strait.
Nagatsuki was a Mutsuki-class destroyer, completed in 1927 and given her name the following year. Shibayama relieved Buichi Ashida. Through the year before the war he had the ship in the fleet's ordinary round of training, including the night exercises on which Japanese destroyer crews were drilled.
In the first weeks of the war Nagatsuki went south with the Philippines invasion. On 10 December 1941 she took part in the landing at Aparri, on the north coast of Luzon. Later that month she was with the main landing in Lingayen Gulf, where an air attack left her lightly damaged. In the East Indies campaign during the early months of 1942 she helped put troops ashore in western Java. Early in April she stood by the cruiser Naka after a United States submarine torpedoed that ship. Shibayama left Nagatsuki on 15 April 1942, and Kanefumi Ninokata became her captain. The destroyer kept on in the Solomons. Tameo Furukawa, who took her in June 1943, was in command on the night of 5–6 July, when she ran aground off Kolombangara at the close of the Battle of Kula Gulf and was wrecked by bombing the next day.
Asagumo was a newer and heavier ship, fifth of the Asashio class, launched at Kawasaki in Kobe in November 1937 and commissioned on 31 March 1938. Shibayama took her on 9 June 1943 in the northern theater, relieving Tooru Iwahashi, who had been her captain since August 1941. Rokuji Arichika had commanded her before Iwahashi. Two days before the handover she had escorted the destroyer Shirakumo, damaged in a collision, toward Paramushiro in the Kuriles, and she was working patrol and escort duty from that base when Shibayama assumed command.
His first operations were the attempts to lift the garrison off Kiska. On 7 July 1943 Asagumo sailed on an evacuation that bad weather forced the force to abandon, and she was back about ten days later. A second effort, from 22 July to 1 August, succeeded. She went in with the light cruisers Abukuma and Kiso and several other destroyers and brought off several hundred soldiers. She afterward escorted the heavy cruiser Maya to Yokosuka.
He remained captain while the destroyer was reassigned, from Destroyer Division 9 to Destroyer Division 10 in October 1943 and to Destroyer Division 4 in July 1944. By the autumn of 1944 she was in the Philippines. In July she was at Manila, and in mid-October she lay at Brunei with the ships being gathered for Leyte.
For the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Asagumo was placed in Vice Admiral Shōji Nishimura's Southern Force, the column sent through Surigao Strait. In the night action of 24–25 October 1944 a torpedo from the United States destroyer McDermut blew away her bow and left her dead in the water. American cruisers and destroyers then finished the stopped ship with gunfire. She sank early on 25 October near 10°04′N, 125°21′E. One hundred ninety-one of her crew were killed. Thirty-nine men survived, Shibayama among them, and they were taken prisoner.
The navy recorded Shibayama as killed in the strait and advanced him to captain as of the day of the battle. That advancement was cancelled once it was known that he was alive. Asagumo was removed from the navy list on 10 January 1945, and with her removal his command of the destroyer ended.