Ships
- IJN Hosho Captain from 18 May 1945 · Relieved on 20 September 1945
Keiji Furutani was a captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy, a Shizuoka man of the Naval Academy class that graduated on 16 December 1915. Ninety-five officers finished with that class. He was still a captain in the last summer of the war, when the navy gave him the old carrier Hosho.
On 18 May 1945 he became captain of Hosho, holding that command together with his regular duty as a member of the Kure Naval Port Department. He remained captain until he was relieved on 20 September 1945. The ship was already in fourth reserve under the Kure Naval District, a status given her on 20 April. She lay camouflaged along the eastern shore of Nishinomi-shima, in a cove south of Kure and a little south of the carrier Ryuho.
Hosho had been in service since December 1922. She was the first carrier the Imperial Navy completed as such from the keel up, and Jiro Toshima was her first captain. Heizaburo Fukuyo, Ryutaro Kaizu, and Seizaburo Kobayashi had her while the navy was still learning how to put aircraft onto a deck and get them off again. Giichiro Kawamura, Kiyoshi Kitagawa, Goro Hara, Hideho Wada, and Eijiro Kondo commanded her from the later 1920s into 1931. Rokuro Horie had the ship during the fighting off Shanghai in 1932, and Teizo Mitsunami and Rokukichi Takeda followed before newer carriers took the fleet work.
In the Pacific War Hosho was a training carrier in the Inland Sea. She had gone to sea with the Combined Fleet's main body for Midway in 1942, sent up a few aircraft to search after the battle, and then stayed home, schooling aircrews and serving as a target for torpedo practice. Fuel was short by 1945, and she spent long stretches moored and disguised near Kure. On 1 June, two weeks after Furutani took her, she was rated a special guard ship of the Kure Naval District.
American carrier planes struck Kure in July. On 24 July Hosho was still at the Nishinomi-shima berth, though she had been ordered toward Moji once minesweeping in the Shimonoseki Strait allowed it. She took a light hit that morning and the damage was small. She left Kure for Moji on 26 July. Japan surrendered on 15 August while Furutani was still her captain, and she was one of the few Japanese carriers still able to steam. He was relieved on 20 September 1945. In early October the ship was taken off the navy list and afterward carried servicemen and civilians home from overseas, work that began after his command had ended.