Ships
- IJN Amatsukaze Captain, March and November 1942
- IJN Shigure Flag, not her captain, 1943
- IJN Yahagi Captain, 7 April 1945
Tameichi Hara was captain of the destroyer Amatsukaze. On the night of 1 March 1942, with Hatsukaze, he depth-charged the submarine Perch about thirty miles northwest of Surabaya and left her on the bottom. They did not sink her. Her own crew scuttled her two mornings later. That same night he wrote that he saw a man light a cigarette on another surfaced submarine, about 4,000 meters off, and that gunfire sank her after her torpedoes missed. That boat was not Perch. No Allied submarine is known to have been lost that night.
On 13 November 1942, off Guadalcanal, Helena's 6-inch guns hit Amatsukaze at about 0204. Her guns went out and the steering went out. Hara steered her by hand from the stern for hundreds of miles, and she made Truk. She was not sunk.
In 1943 he took Destroyer Division 27 and flew his flag in Shigure. He was not her captain. Her own captain still had the deck. Most of the time the other ships of the division were elsewhere, so the division he actually had was this one ship. At Vella Gulf on 6 August 1943 he had argued against repeating the same route. He was overruled. Three of the four Japanese destroyers were sunk. Shigure got away after a torpedo passed through her rudder and did not explode. Eleven nights later, off Horaniu, his flag was in her again. She was not hit. On 2 November his flag was in her again, at Empress Augusta Bay. She was not hit.
He later commanded the cruiser Yahagi on Yamato's last sortie, on 7 April 1945. He survived that too.