Ships
- IJN Hosho Captain from 15 November 1935 · Relieved on 16 November 1936
Munetaka Sakamaki was a captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy when he assumed command of the aircraft carrier Hosho on 15 November 1935. The ship he joined was already a landmark in the fleet and already well into her service life. Completed in 1922, Hosho had been Japan's first carrier built for that role from the keel, and the lessons of her early deck trials still shaped how she was run.
Under Sakamaki she worked as a flush-deck carrier. A small island tried in her first years had been removed after those trials, leaving a short, open deck and a hangar that held only a handful of aircraft. Newer fleet carriers were already being built around much larger air groups. Hosho spent her days on the narrower task of turning aviators into deck pilots: repeated approaches, arrested landings, and the drills that made a moving flight deck routine.
He came aboard about seven weeks after the typhoon of 26 September 1935, the storm known as the Fourth Fleet Incident, which had struck a large exercise force east of Japan and had smashed the forward end of Hosho's flight deck. His year therefore began with a carrier in the hands of the dockyard. Through 1936 she went back to the training cycle, qualifying pilots while the navy digested what the storm had shown about lightly built modern ships and about weather as a threat equal to an enemy.
Command of Hosho kept a captain close to the flying. The hull was small enough that launches and recoveries happened under his eye, and the margin on that short deck was thin. Wind across the deck, the state of the arresting gear, and aircraft already worn by hard use all fell inside his responsibility, together with the ordinary work of seamanship, discipline, and upkeep on a ship that had been in commission for more than a decade.
Sakamaki was relieved on 16 November 1936, one year and a day after he had taken command. He left Hosho still employed as a training carrier, in the months before the widening war in China pulled even the oldest flight decks toward operations. The year he spent in her sat in the middle of Japanese naval aviation's shift from experiment toward a central weapon, with a small repaired carrier still serving as the classroom where pilots learned the deck.