Ships
- IJN Takao Captain from 22 March 1945
Takeo Ishisaka was a captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy. On 22 March 1945 he took command of the heavy cruiser Takao at Singapore, in the last spring of the Pacific War. He inherited a ship whose days with the striking fleet were already finished.
Takao belonged to a class of large cruisers completed in the early 1930s, armed with a twenty-centimeter main battery and a heavy torpedo outfit. With her sisters she had spent the early Pacific War in the forces that operated from the central Pacific and from Southeast Asia. Officers who served in her during those years included Bunji Asakura, Toshihira Inoguchi, and Shigechika Hayashi. By the time Ishisaka came aboard, that seagoing career had closed.
The break had come on 23 October 1944, in the Palawan Passage, as a Japanese cruiser force moved toward Leyte Gulf. American submarines attacked the formation, and torpedoes from the submarine Darter struck Takao. Flooding and the loss of her rudders forced her out of the operation. After emergency measures she reached Singapore. There the limits of the dockyard, and the wider shortage of material, left her unfit to steam with the fleet again. Her remaining guns were turned to the defense of the anchorage.
Ishisaka's command was a harbor command. From late March 1945 the crew lived aboard a cruiser held at Singapore, keeping machinery, weapons, and watertight integrity in order while Allied aircraft ranged over Malaya. Fuel and spare parts were scarce, and the sea route back to Japan was closed to a ship in her condition. The daily work was upkeep, local defense, and the routine of a warship confined to her berth.
On 31 July 1945 a British XE-class midget submarine worked in under Takao in the Singapore anchorage and left demolition charges against the hull. The explosions opened her further, and she settled on the shallow bottom. She was still in Japanese hands when the war ended two weeks later. The cruiser remained at Singapore through the surrender and was taken out and scuttled after the war. Ishisaka's recorded command of her dated from 22 March 1945, the months in which her last duty was to hold that berth.