Japan's modern navy rose from two centuries of banned ocean-going ships
For more than 200 years from the 1640s, building an ocean-going ship in Japan was punishable by death. When American warships forced the country open in 1854, its fleet was badly outdated. Within decades it had assembled a modern navy, and by 1920 only Britain's and America's were larger.
Seafaring itself was old. Troops crossed between Korea and Japan from the 3rd century, and during the Warring States period rival lords built coastal fleets of several hundred vessels. In 1576 the warlord Oda Nobunaga had six iron-covered Oatakebune built, possibly among the earliest ironclads anywhere. Toyotomi Hideyoshi outlawed wakō piracy in 1588 and turned the former raiders into the fleet he sent against Korea in 1592–1598. In 1613 the lord of Sendai launched Date Maru, a 500-ton galleon that carried Hasekura Tsunenaga's embassy across the Pacific, and from 1604 the shogunate licensed about 350 armed Red seal ships for trade with Southeast Asia.
Seclusion, or sakoku, then cut Japan off. Only Dutch and Chinese traders were admitted at Nagasaki, and the Dutch post at Dejima became a keyhole onto Western science, keeping scholars aware of mapmaking, optics and mechanics even as practical seamanship withered. Foreign ships grew bolder: HMS Phaeton caused an incident at Nagasaki in 1808, and after the Morrison affair of 1837 and China's defeat in the Opium War, the shogunate softened its 1825 order to repel foreigners into an 1842 edict supplying them with firewood and water. A small Western-style warship, Sōshun Maru, appeared in 1849 with 22 oars, and nine copies guarded Edo Bay by 1853.
Commodore Matthew Perry's squadron arrived in 1853 and 1854, and the Convention of Kanagawa of 1854 ended isolation. The shogunate quickly obtained its first steam warship, Kankō Maru, with Dutch help in 1855 and opened a training school at Nagasaki. Future admiral Enomoto Takeaki studied in the Netherlands, Kanrin Maru escorted a delegation to the United States in 1860, and in 1865 the French engineer Léonce Verny was hired to build arsenals at Yokosuka and Nagasaki. Regional fleets, the biggest belonging to Satsuma, proved no match for British guns at Kagoshima in 1863.
The Meiji Restoration of 1868 toppled the shogunate. At Japan's first naval review, on 26 March 1868 in Osaka Bay, six domain ships totalling 2,252 tons were outweighed by a single French vessel. The Imperial Japanese Navy was formally founded in July 1869, after Enomoto had fled north with eight steam warships and 2,000 men to proclaim the Republic of Ezo, defeated at the Naval Battle of Hakodate that May. The navy lasted until 1945 and was dissolved after Japan's surrender.
Source: Imperial Japanese Navy
