Ships
- IJN Tenryu Captain from 28 August 1941 · Relieved on 5 June 1942
Mitsutaro Goto was a captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy. He took command of the light cruiser Tenryu on 28 August 1941 and remained in her until 5 June 1942. Tenryu was a small cruiser completed in 1919 to lead destroyer flotillas. Thinly protected and armed with 14-centimeter guns and torpedoes, she spent his command paired with her sister Tatsuta on escort and invasion duty in the central and south Pacific.
The two cruisers formed the 18th Cruiser Division of the Fourth Fleet's South Seas Force. Goto was aboard when the Pacific War opened in December 1941, and Tenryu joined the first attempt to seize Wake Island. On 11 December the Marine garrison's coastal guns broke up the landing. Shells hit Tenryu and killed members of her crew. In that same action the destroyer Hayate was sunk by gunfire, and Kisaragi was lost as the ships drew off. The landing group as a whole was directed from another ship. Goto's duty was Tenryu.
A second expedition closed on Wake before the month ended, with aircraft from the carriers Hiryu and Soryu striking the defenses. Japanese troops got ashore on 23 December and the atoll fell. Tenryu again stood offshore with the covering ships, then turned south with the South Seas Force toward the Bismarck Archipelago.
In January 1942 the cruiser covered the landings that took Rabaul on New Britain and Kavieng on New Ireland. In March she supported the occupations of Lae and Salamaua on the New Guinea coast. The soldiers were already ashore when, on 10 March, aircraft from the American carriers Lexington and Yorktown attacked the transports and warships gathered in the Huon Gulf. Tenryu remained with the South Seas Force after the raid and continued screening convoys and landing groups in the waters north of Australia.
Early in May the same division was committed to a seaborne advance on Port Moresby. Tenryu operated with Tatsuta in the covering group on the flank of the transports. Farther east, carrier forces fought the Battle of the Coral Sea, and the Port Moresby convoy turned back. Goto was relieved on 5 June 1942. The cruiser's later service, including the night battle off Savo Island in August 1942 and her sinking on 18 December 1942 by the submarine Albacore off Madang, belonged to the captains who followed him.