Ships
- IJN I-124 (I-124) Captain from 31 January 1941 · In command when she was lost, 20 January 1942
Koichi Kishigami, a lieutenant commander in the Imperial Japanese Navy, became captain of the submarine I-124 on 31 January 1941. He was still in command when she was lost on 20 January 1942.
I-124 was a large minelaying submarine of Submarine Division 9, sailing with Submarine Squadron 6. For part of 1941 she carried the division flag. On 2 August 1941 that duty passed to I-123. The division commander on the last cruise was Commander Takao Endo, who embarked in I-124. Kishigami remained the submarine's captain.
Late in 1941 I-124 left home waters for the South China Sea. She reached Samah, on Hainan, on 27 November 1941, in company with the submarine tender Chogei. On 2 December she received the Combined Fleet signal "Climb Mount Niitaka 1208," ordering that the war would begin on 8 December, Japan time.
As the fighting opened she laid thirty-nine mines in the approaches to Manila Bay, then waited southwest of Lubang Island to report the weather and to recover Japanese airmen downed over Manila. On 10 December she torpedoed and sank a British merchant ship of about 1,523 tons off western Luzon. She put in at Cam Ranh Bay, worked back through Philippine waters, and passed south by the Mindoro Strait and the Sulu Sea. On 31 December 1941 she entered Davao and rejoined I-121, I-122, I-123, and the squadron tender.
The squadron was sent toward the seas north of Australia. On the morning of 20 January 1942, off Darwin, I-124 fired torpedoes at the American fleet oiler Trinity. The escorting destroyer Alden counterattacked with depth charges and then lost contact. The Australian corvette Deloraine and an American aircraft took up the hunt, and a depth charge and a bomb burst close alongside the submarine. I-124 went down with every man on board. Kishigami, Endo, and the rest of the company, eighty men in all, died in her.
The wreck lies in the approaches northwest of Darwin, in about fifty metres of water, and has been left as a war grave. Kishigami's daughter, Atsuko Kishigami, later pressed for the boat to be raised and the dead brought home to Japan. The hull remained on the seabed. Memorial gatherings at Darwin have continued to mark the loss, including a service on 20 January 2022, eighty years afterward.