Ships
- IJN Tatsuta Captain from 20 July 1942 · Relieved on 7 January 1943
Matake Yoshimura was born in Fukuoka Prefecture in 1896 and spent his adult life in the Imperial Japanese Navy. His final rank was captain. His commands followed the fleet itself, from small torpedo craft between the wars to a light cruiser in the Solomons, a new squadron cruiser at Leyte Gulf, and a battleship laid up at Kure in the last summer of the war. He died on 15 February 1978.
In 1914 he graduated from Fukuoka Prefectural Shuyukan Middle School. The same year he passed the examinations for both the Naval Academy and the Army Academy, the latter for its 29th class, and he chose the navy. He graduated from the Naval Academy on 24 November 1917 with the 45th class, placed 52nd among 89 midshipmen. Torpedoes became his branch. On 1 December 1924 he entered the advanced course at the Torpedo School, and for years afterward his appointments were either in destroyers or in teaching other officers the destroyer trade.
He began handling his own ships on 1 November 1930 as captain of the old Momi-class destroyer Take, and through 1 December he was also captain of her sister Nashi. On 1 December 1932 he added another Momi-class boat, Kaya. On 1 April 1933 he took the Kamikaze-class destroyers Yunagi and Asanagi together, one of the double commands the navy still used for its older flotilla craft. On 1 November 1934 he stepped up to Isonami of the Fubuki class, a much larger ship with heavier guns and a heavier torpedo broadside than the boats he had just left. For a few weeks in November 1936 he also held Shinonome, another Fubuki, and on 1 December 1936 he went ashore as an instructor at the Torpedo School.
He returned to sea on 19 October 1940 as commander of the 27th Destroyer Division. Promotion to captain came on 15 October 1941, shortly before Japan opened the Pacific War. He was still in that division command at the Battle of Midway and is carried on the battle from 5 to 7 June 1942, doing the screening and escort work of a destroyer division while the carrier force that had begun the war was destroyed. About six weeks later the navy gave him a cruiser.
On 20 July 1942 Yoshimura relieved Yoshifumi Baba as captain of the light cruiser Tatsuta. She was the second ship of the Tenryū class, completed at Sasebo on 31 May 1919, fast and thin-skinned, built to lead destroyers and transports rather than to stand in a line of heavy cruisers. The appointment fell as the Eighth Fleet at Rabaul was putting troops ashore at Buna on the north coast of Papua. United States Army bombers struck the ships on the way back, and Tatsuta came through that raid intact. For the rest of 1942 she remained in that campaign, escorting reinforcements and supplies among Rabaul, the Solomon Islands, and the New Guinea coast while the fight for Guadalcanal wore down the light forces. He was relieved on 7 January 1943. The cruiser outlasted his command. On 13 March 1944, while escorting a convoy off Hachijō-jima south of Tokyo Bay, she was sunk by the American submarine Sand Lance.
He went back to flotilla duty as commander of the 10th Destroyer Division and kept that command until 21 September 1943. In October he was named fitting-out officer of the new light cruiser Yahagi, an Agano-class ship designed to carry a destroyer-squadron commander and his staff. On 29 December 1943 he became her first captain. He still had her in October 1944, when the remaining heavy surface force was sent against the American landing at Leyte. From 20 to 25 October Yahagi screened those ships through the carrier attacks in the Sibuyan Sea and the close gun and torpedo action off Samar, and she was still afloat when the force turned away.
On 20 December 1944 he moved to the battleship Haruna of the Kongō class. She had already been hard used, including at Leyte, before he came aboard, and shortage of fuel kept the surviving battleships in home waters during his command. On 28 July 1945 aircraft from the American fast carrier force bombed the ships at Kure. Haruna was left on the bottom in shallow water, her upper works still standing clear of the harbor. On 15 August 1945, the day of the surrender, Yoshimura was attached to the Kure Naval District, his last post in uniform.
The occupation authorities provisionally barred him from public office on 28 November 1947, the same purge that reached many other career officers of his generation. In the years that followed he studied the naval war and wrote on the end of Japan’s battleships, a subject his last sea command had put in front of him. His final rank remained captain. He died on 15 February 1978.