Ships
- IJN Noshiro Captain from 15 December 1943
Sueyoshi Kajiwara, a captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy, took command of the light cruiser Noshiro on 15 December 1943. He relieved Yoshioki Tawara, who had been the ship's first captain since she entered service that summer. Kajiwara came from the training cruiser Kashima, a Katori-class ship, which he had commanded until 3 December.
Noshiro was the second cruiser of the Agano class, named for the Noshiro River in Akita Prefecture, and was designed as the flagship of a destroyer squadron. She had been completed at Yokosuka on 30 June 1943 and, from the middle of August, carried the flag of Destroyer Squadron 2 in the Second Fleet. Kajiwara's appointment coincided with a change of admiral. On 15 December Rear Admiral Mikio Hayakawa, until then captain of the battleship Nagato, was named to the squadron and hoisted his flag in Noshiro the next day. The officer he replaced moved to Destroyer Squadron 11.
Noshiro remained the squadron flagship through 1944. In June she went to sea with the Mobile Fleet for the Battle of the Philippine Sea. In October she sailed again with Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita's Center Force for the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and on 25 October she was still flying Hayakawa's flag in the surface action off Samar.
The ship was lost the next morning, 26 October 1944, while Kurita's force was withdrawing. Carrier aircraft, including a strike from the American carrier Hornet, hit her west of Panay. Torpedoes put her boilers out of action. She stopped and took on a list to port. Kajiwara ordered the forward magazines flooded in an effort to bring her upright. The bow continued to settle, and he then ordered the crew to abandon ship. Noshiro sank at about 11:13, south of Mindoro. In that last action her guns fired twenty main-battery shells, thirty-five high-angle shells, and about eleven thousand machine-gun rounds, and her gunners were credited with three aircraft destroyed, one probable, and five shared with other ships. The destroyers Hamanami and Akishimo took off the survivors, Kajiwara and Hayakawa among them, and the squadron flag passed to Hamanami.
Kajiwara's command closed with the loss of the ship. On 3 November 1944 he was attached to the Yokosuka Naval District. Noshiro was removed from the navy list on 20 December 1944.