IJN Mutsu
by Paul Helfrich

1/700 IJN Mutsu (Aoshima)

I built this model in 1991 - my first Japanese battleship. I recently dusted her off to be photographed. She's an impressive-looking ship, even in my simple, out-of-the-box rendition.

The Mutsu and her sister Nagato were the first (and only) Japanese battleships to mount 16" guns. With their arrangement of 8 16" guns in four double turrets, they were contemporaries and rivals of the USS Colorado, Maryland, and West Virginia.

While the Nagato was the only Japanese battleship to survive the war, at least in a floating condition, the Mutsu was lost to a magazine explosion in Japanese home waters in 1943. Her sister was sunk, along with obsolete US vessels and the German cruiser Prinz Eugen, as part of the Bikini Atoll A-Bomb tests.