Ships
- IJN Fuso Captain from 15 September 1941
Mitsuo Kinoshita was a captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy who took command of the battleship Fuso on 15 September 1941. The ship was one of the two units of Battleship Division 2, paired with Yamashiro in the First Fleet, and she lay in the Inland Sea as Japan completed the last months of preparation for war.
By the time Kinoshita came aboard, Fuso was an old dreadnought that had already been rebuilt. Completed in 1915, she had been reconstructed in the 1930s with a taller tower bridge, new machinery, and a heavier anti-aircraft battery, while keeping the twelve 35.6-centimeter guns in six twin turrets that defined her silhouette. She was slower than the newer battleships and was kept with the battle line held back in home waters rather than assigned to the carrier striking force.
On 8 December 1941, Japanese time, the war opened with the attack on Pearl Harbor and the landings in Southeast Asia. The First Fleet battleships, Fuso among them, put to sea from the Hashirajima anchorage as a distant covering force and moved out toward the Bonin Islands, then returned to the Inland Sea without meeting the enemy. Their role in those first days was to stand ready if the American Pacific Fleet sortied, a contingency that the carrier attack had already made unlikely.
Kinoshita's captaincy therefore fell at the turn from peace to war, when Fuso was still a fully manned capital ship of the Combined Fleet and her daily work was gunnery, drills, and readiness in the western Inland Sea. The battleship would later be committed to the fighting in the Philippines and would be lost in the Surigao Strait action of October 1944, under another commanding officer. Masami Ban was the captain who took her into that last battle. Earlier and later in the ship's company were officers such as Nobumichi Tsuruoka and Keizo Komura.
The record that fixes Kinoshita to Fuso dates his command from 15 September 1941 and identifies him as her captain. In that appointment he held one of the Navy's older battleships at the moment the Pacific War began, with the ship still part of the battle force kept in Japanese home waters.