Mako's strategic value had been obvious for centuries, but the Japanese were the first foreign power to exploit it systematically. During the First Sino-Japanese War, the Pescadores were the first portion of Taiwan seized by Japanese forces in 1895 -- a stepping stone that made the conquest of the main island possible. After the war, Japan formalized its presence. On July 4, 1901, Mako was designated a yokobu, a third-echelon naval port. It was a modest classification: no shipyard, no training school, just docking and refueling infrastructure positioned at the midpoint of the Taiwan Strait. But that midpoint location was everything. Any naval force controlling the Pescadores could monitor shipping between mainland China and Taiwan while projecting power into the South China Sea.

The base served as a staging point during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, when Japan needed to move fleets quickly between its home waters and the western Pacific. In the decades that followed, Mako settled into the routine of a garrison outpost -- a rotating cast of vice-admirals commanding small forces that patrolled the strait and the China coastline. The list of commanding officers reads like a who's-who of the Imperial Japanese Navy: more than thirty flag officers cycled through between 1901 and 1943, including Vice-Admiral Ibo Takahashi and Admiral Takeo Takagi, who would later command major fleet operations in the Pacific War. When the Second Sino-Japanese War erupted in 1937, Mako's tempo increased sharply as the base supported operations along the Chinese coast.

At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941, the Mako Guard District's order of battle was modest by fleet standards: three patrol gunboats -- the Akitsu Maru, Chiyo Maru, and Chohakusan Maru -- plus a supply ship and an air group equipped with Aichi D1A dive bombers. Three minesweeper divisions rounded out the garrison. The base's importance lay not in its own firepower but in its function as a logistics hub. Ships bound for the Philippines and Southeast Asian operations passed through Mako for refueling and resupply, making the harbor a bottleneck through which much of Japan's southern offensive flowed.

By 1943, the strategic calculus had shifted. Allied submarine warfare was making open-water logistics increasingly dangerous, and the Pescadores' exposed position in the Taiwan Strait made Mako vulnerable. The Guard District was disbanded and reestablished as the Takao Guard District at Takao -- present-day Kaohsiung -- on Taiwan's main island, where deeper harbor facilities and better air defenses offered more protection. The last commander of the Mako Guard District was Admiral Takeo Takagi, who oversaw the transfer before going on to command submarine forces in the final years of the war. Today, the city of Makung (modern Magong) bears little visible trace of the naval infrastructure that once made it a linchpin of Japanese maritime strategy in the western Pacific.