Ships
- IJN Hosho Captain from 20 September 1945 · Relieved on 8 March 1946
Kunizo Kaneoka was a captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy. On 20 September 1945 he took command of the aircraft carrier Hosho, relieving Keiji Furutani, who had held the ship together with a post in the Kure naval port department. Japan had surrendered five weeks earlier. Hosho was still on the navy list, in home waters, and still able to steam.
She was an old ship by the time he came aboard. Completed on 27 December 1922, Hosho was the first Japanese aircraft carrier finished for that work from the keel up, built at the Asano yard in Tsurumi and fitted out at Yokosuka. The name means a flying phoenix. Jiro Toshima brought her into service, and Heizaburo Fukuyo and Ryutaro Kaizu followed him through the years when Japanese pilots were learning to land on a flight deck. In the 1930s she operated off China. In the Pacific War she spent most of her time training aircrews in the Inland Sea, with one operational sortie in June 1942, when she sailed with the battleship body at Midway and sent out scouting aircraft. American strikes around Kure in July 1945 left her only lightly damaged, and at the surrender she was nearly intact and fit for a sea passage.
Kaneoka’s duty was repatriation. On 5 October 1945 Hosho was removed from the navy list and assigned to bring Japanese servicemen home under Allied direction. The crew for that work was small for a carrier: 25 officers, 10 special-duty officers, 6 warrant officers, and 369 petty officers and enlisted men. In the first half of October she left Kure with the light cruiser Kashima for the Marshall Islands, threading channels out of the Inland Sea that were still sown with mines. On 16 October she reached Wotje and embarked 700 men, left the same day for Eniwetok, and on 22 October took another 311 aboard at Jaluit. She sailed for Japan the next day. On 3 November she landed 1,011 men at Uraga.
The flight deck lengthened in 1944 blocked the view from the bridge and was a poor fit for a crowded transport in the open sea. On 1 December 1945 Hosho was placed under the Kure Regional Demobilization Bureau as a special transport. On 5 December she entered the Hitachi dock at Innoshima, where the forward stretch of flight deck over the forecastle was cut away and other repairs were made so the bridge could see ahead. Kaneoka stayed in command through that refit. After the navy was reorganized into the demobilization service he remained the ship’s commanding officer, the appointment carrying him as a captain and as a Second Demobilization officer.
On 5 January 1946 Hosho left Kure on another repatriation voyage, going by way of Saeki toward Wewak on the north coast of New Guinea. Before the month ended she embarked Japanese servicemen who had been gathered on Fauro Island in the Shortlands and turned for home. Kaneoka was relieved on 8 March 1946. The carrier kept at the same work after he left. By the time she was released from special-transport duty on 31 August 1946 she had made repeated passages between Japan and the south and had carried about forty thousand servicemen and civilians. Breaking up began at a Hitachi yard in Osaka and was finished on 1 May 1947.