Ships
- IJN Akishimo Captain from 1 April 1944
Lieutenant Commander Kotaro Nakao took command of the Imperial Japanese Navy destroyer Akishimo on 1 April 1944. She was a new Yugumo-class ship, completed on 11 March at the Fujinagata yard in Osaka and only then working up. He was her second commanding officer, succeeding Toshio Hirayama, who moved on to the sister ship Hayashimo.
Akishimo was serving in the 11th Torpedo Squadron, the training force in the western Inland Sea, and Nakao used April to drill her with the other ships of that squadron. On 10 May 1944 she joined Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa's 1st Mobile Fleet together with Hayashimo, Hibiki, and Inazuma. Rear Admiral Tamotsu Takama, the training-squadron commander, asked the Combined Fleet and Ozawa's staff to keep a close watch on Akishimo and Shimotsuki, because neither crew had finished a full course of drills. Through the early summer Nakao's destroyer screened the carrier force.
In the Battle of Leyte Gulf, from 23 to 26 October 1944, Akishimo sailed with the 1st Diversion Attack Force. On 23 October she took aboard 769 men from the heavy cruiser Maya after that ship went down in the Palawan Passage. The next day she stood by the heavy cruiser Myoko, which a torpedo had forced out of the action. On 25 October she collided with the destroyer Shimakaze and came off with light damage. On 26 October she picked up 328 survivors of the light cruiser Noshiro.
In November the destroyer was sent on the Ormoc reinforcement run. On 10 November 1944 Akishimo escorted troop convoy TA No. 4 from Manila toward Ormoc. On the return passage, United States Army B-25 Mitchells struck the formation. A bomb hit the ship, tore away her bow, and left twenty of the crew dead and thirty-five injured. She reached Manila at sixteen knots and entered the Cavite Navy Yard on 11 November for repairs.
She was still at Cavite, moored outboard of the destroyer Akebono, when aircraft came back over Manila Bay on 13 November. Nakao was ashore that day at naval headquarters in Manila. Lieutenant Minoru Harada, the navigator and the senior officer remaining on board, directed the fight. Three bombs struck forward of the No. 1 gun and on the after deck. Fire spread into a magazine, and Akishimo burned through the night. Around five in the morning on 14 November she rolled onto her starboard side and settled with the bridge in the mud. Harada was among fifteen men killed in that attack, and twenty-five others were wounded. Nakao's appointment as captain ran on until 25 November 1944, and during that command he was advanced from lieutenant commander to commander.