Japan Maritime Self Defense Force

Japan's naval branch carries out its mission along two lines, keeping the country's shipping moving and shielding its territory from seaborne attack. Because the nation draws nearly all of its fuel and food from abroad, any severing of those supply lines would ripple painfully through daily life at home and shake the wider global economy as well.

To hold its trade routes open, the fleet must fend off hostile submarines, surface vessels, and aircraft, blending surveillance, escort duty, and the guarding of ports and narrow straits into one effort. Should an enemy move to seize land, the navy aims to halt the push out on the water before it can reach the coast. During World War III the maritime force joined the ground and air branches in Japan's defense, sinking enemy ships and planes and seeding mines across the likely landing grounds. Even so, the country could not truly protect the routes it leaned on. Its oil arrived from the Middle East aboard tankers that crossed the Indian Ocean, slipped through the Strait of Malacca, and pressed on into the South China Sea, every leg exposed to trouble in Southeast Asia, and that vulnerability of its ocean commerce remained the nation's deepest strategic flaw.

No individual sailors are named; the service is defined instead by its constraints and equipment. Heavy coastal fishing and shipping traffic squeeze the time available for training at sea, especially in the shallow water needed to practice mine work and submarine rescue, so exercises are slotted into the quiet fishing stretches of winter and summer, amounting to roughly ten days a year. Two oceangoing training vessels support a yearly long-distance course for those leaving the one-year officer candidate school. Among its hardware, the force fields the armored suits designated MSDF Type 303.