Ships
- IJN I-168 (I-168) Captain from 25 July 1941
Lieutenant Commander Otoji Nakamura of the Imperial Japanese Navy took command of the submarine I-168 on 25 July 1941, the day the boat was returned to commission after months in reserve. She was a large Kaidai-type fleet submarine, completed at Kure in July 1934. Through Nakamura's time aboard she was still numbered I-68. The designation I-168 was given on 20 May 1942, after his command had ended.
In the autumn of 1941 the submarine served in Submarine Division 12 of Submarine Squadron 3, part of the Sixth Fleet. On 11 November she left Saeki for Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands as the squadron moved out for the Hawaiian operation. Nakamura sailed from Kwajalein on 23 November and took up a patrol station south of Oahu. On the morning of the Pearl Harbor attack, 7 December, the squadron's boats lay roughly twenty-five to fifty nautical miles south of the island, ordered to strike any ships that tried to leave the harbor.
The next day I-168 and I-69 were ordered to wait off the harbor for midget submarines that had gone in with the attack. None of those boats came out, and Nakamura returned to the patrol line. From 13 December American ships hunted the submarine with depth charges. She was attacked twenty-one times. The last attack wrecked many of her battery cells and flooded the after torpedo room. Nakamura broke off the patrol and reached Kwajalein on 28 December 1941.
The damage was beyond what Kwajalein could put right. After temporary repairs, I-168 left on 31 December and arrived at Kure on 9 January 1942. On 17 January Nakamura went aboard the Combined Fleet flagship Yamato and described the depth-charge attacks off Hawaii to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and the fleet staff. On 31 January 1942 he turned the submarine over to Lieutenant Commander Yahachi Tanabe.
The rest of the boat's war was fought under other commanding officers. Tanabe had her at Midway, and in June 1942, after the renumbering, I-168 torpedoed the damaged carrier Yorktown and the destroyer Hammann. Both ships were lost. Nakamura was not the captain for that attack. Acting command afterward passed to Kinzo Tonozuka and then to Katsuji Watanabe. Sakae Nakajima took command in October 1942. He was still in command when an American submarine sank I-168 off New Hanover on 27 July 1943 and Nakajima and the crew were lost with her. Nakamura was not the captain when the submarine went down. His command of her ran from 25 July 1941 to 31 January 1942.