Ships
- IJN Ikazuchi Captain from 1 December 1936
Torashiro Takeuchi (竹内虎四郎) was an officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy, a graduate of the forty-ninth class of the Naval Academy at Etajima, who as a lieutenant commander commanded two destroyers in the middle 1930s: Nadakaze from 15 November 1935 and Ikazuchi from 1 December 1936 until 1 December 1937. He had earlier served as torpedo officer of the destroyer Kamikaze. His is a short and sparsely documented career. The sources examined establish his class, his home city, a handful of appointments and nothing at all of his service after 1937.
The registers of the Naval Academy's forty-ninth class give his home as Tokyo. A roster of Academy graduates compiled in the 1970s adds the school he attended before Etajima, the Keika Middle School in the capital. His birth date, family and parents do not appear in the sources examined.
He graduated from Etajima with the forty-ninth class on 16 July 1921. There were 178 graduates. His class standing is not recorded in the sources examined.
The first record of him after graduation is a listing of the torpedo officers of the destroyer Kamikaze, the lead ship of her class, which names Lieutenant Torashiro Takeuchi from 23 March 1929. He held the post until 1 December 1930, a little over twenty months.
On 15 November 1935 Lieutenant Commander Takeuchi was appointed to command Nadakaze. She was a destroyer of the Minekaze class, built at the Maizuru Navy Yard and completed on 30 September 1921, two and a half months after he graduated. In his time she belonged to the 4th Destroyer Division of the 2nd Destroyer Squadron, in the 2nd Fleet. Her captains in these years changed roughly once a year, and Takeuchi's tenure ran to 1 December 1936, a year and sixteen days. On the same date he took over Ikazuchi.
Ikazuchi was a newer ship, of the third series of the Fubuki type, built at Uraga and completed on 15 August 1932. She was one of four sisters, with Akatsuki, Hibiki and Inazuma. Takeuchi commanded her for exactly one year, until 1 December 1937, when he was relieved by Commander Masao Yanagikawa. Of what the ship did in those twelve months the sources examined say nothing.
What the name Ikazuchi chiefly stands for in the history of the Pacific war belongs to a later captain, Lieutenant Commander Shunsaku Kudo, whose crew pulled several hundred British sailors from the sea after the Battle of the Java Sea in March 1942. By then Takeuchi had been gone from her for more than four years. Ikazuchi was sunk by the American submarine Harder on 13 April 1944, with no survivors. That was the end of the ship he had commanded in 1937; her sister Inazuma was lost a month later, and only Hibiki of the four survived the war.
The record then falls silent. The sources examined give no appointment for him after 1 December 1937, no wartime post and no later rank. The registers of his class carry no death in action against his name, as they do for many of his classmates, and the roster of graduates compiled in the 1970s leaves his final rank blank. Whether he left the Navy in the 1930s, served on shore through the war or survived to see its end cannot be said from them.