Ships
- IJN Hosho Captain from 1 December 1923 · Relieved on 15 April 1925
Captain Ryutaro Kaizu of the Imperial Japanese Navy commanded the aircraft carrier Hosho from 1 December 1923 until he was relieved on 15 April 1925. He was the third officer to hold that post.
Hosho had entered service in December 1922 as the first carrier completed from the keel for that role, and through Kaizu's months aboard she was still the only carrier in the Japanese fleet. She was a small ship, about 7,470 tons, with a flight deck a little over 550 feet long, a speed near 25 knots, and space for about fifteen aircraft plus a few spares. Her first deck takeoffs and landings had already been made off Yokosuka in February and March 1923, before Kaizu took command, including the first landing by a Japanese naval pilot.
His tour fell while the ship was still being altered to match what those early flights had shown. The small island on the starboard side interfered with aircraft moving on the deck, and during this experimental period it was removed, with the bridge brought down to the forward edge of the flight deck. Arresting gear was still unsettled. One pattern of wires and barriers after another was fitted and then set aside while pilots and deck crews learned the timing of a landing on a short deck at sea. The routines worked out on Hosho in these years were the ones later, larger carriers inherited.
Kaizu followed Heizaburo Fukuyo, who had commanded Hosho through the spring and autumn of 1923, and before Fukuyo the ship had been brought into service under Jiro Toshima. On 15 April 1925 Kaizu turned the carrier over to Seizaburo Kobayashi. She remained in the same line of work under the captains who came next, among them Giichiro Kawamura, a school ship for deck flying long after Kaizu's sixteen months had ended.