Ships
- IJN Aoba Captain from 1 January 1945
Captain Seiroku Murayama of the Imperial Japanese Navy took command of the heavy cruiser Aoba on 1 January 1945. He held the ship together with his principal post as chief of port affairs at Kure, and the appointment ran through the surrender on 15 August 1945. He relieved Chusaburo Yamazumi, who had been captain since 4 June 1944 and had brought the cruiser home from her last sortie.
Aoba was the name ship of a two-cruiser class, built at Nagasaki and commissioned in September 1927. Before the Pacific War she served in the numbered cruiser squadrons and often flew a flag officer's pennant. From December 1941 she joined the seizures of Guam and Wake, fought at the Coral Sea, and operated off Guadalcanal. In the night battle off Cape Esperance in October 1942, American gunfire smashed her bridge, killed Rear Admiral Aritomo Goto of the Sixth Squadron, and killed close to eighty of the ship's company. In the weeks that followed, Tsutau Araki was assigned to Aoba for a short additional tour while he was already captain of the cruiser Chikuma.
After repairs Aoba returned south, suffered fresh bomb damage in the spring of 1943, and from late that year worked the East Indies on supply and readiness duty. Kamenosuke Yamamori commanded her from 24 February 1943 until 4 June 1944. Under Yamazumi she sailed in October 1944 toward the Leyte operation. On 23 October the United States submarine Bream torpedoed her amidships, and bombs damaged her further before she could be nursed into Kure in December. A full docking would have occupied a berth the yard was keeping for ships still expected to go to sea, so the heavy repair was set aside and Aoba stayed moored near the Kure Navy Yard.
Murayama therefore received a cruiser that remained in harbor. During 1945 the Navy placed her in reserve and turned her remaining guns to the defense of the base, employing her as a floating anti-aircraft battery inside the port whose affairs he directed. Carrier aircraft bombed Kure on 24 July 1945 and hit Aoba. On 28 July carrier planes struck again and set her burning, and United States Army heavy bombers followed, tearing the stern away. She was left listing on the shallow bottom off the yard. Photographs made in the harbor that October show camouflage vegetation still scattered on the decks and a large bomb hole in the forecastle plating.
The Navy removed Aoba from the active rolls on 20 November 1945. The wreck was broken up at Kure, with disposal dated 1 July 1947. Murayama's place with her is that final captaincy, from 1 January 1945 to 15 August 1945, while a cruiser of the early Solomon fighting lay in the harbor attached to the port establishment he ran.