Kure was Japan's premier naval shipbuilding port, home to the Kure Naval Arsenal and the Kure Naval District. The Yamato was completed here in December 1941, her construction so secret that the drydock was concealed behind massive curtains of rope and sisal. Her nine 46-centimeter guns were the largest naval weapons ever mounted on a warship, and the lathe that machined them -- the enormous No. 15299 -- still stands outside the museum today. Kure's identity as a naval city runs deep, and the museum traces that history from the age of imperial shipbuilding through to the present Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force. Next door, the JMSDF Kure Museum displays the retired submarine Akishio, a Yushio-class boat that visitors can walk through.

Beyond the flagship model, the museum's large exhibition hall preserves artifacts that bring the war's human cost into sharp focus. A Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter, a Kairyu-class midget submarine, and a Kaiten human torpedo sit alongside one another. The Kaiten was a modified torpedo steered by a single pilot on a suicide mission, and the museum displays the farewell letters these young men wrote to their families before their final sorties, along with personal photographs, swords, and wills. Outside, hardware from the battleship Mutsu -- a 41-centimeter naval gun, an anchor, a rudder, and a propeller -- stands at the museum entrance, each piece scaled to remind visitors of the enormity of these vessels. Behind the building, a full-scale outline of the Yamato's bridge gives a sense of the ship's commanding presence.

In May 2015, a digital survey of the sunken Yamato captured footage showing identifiable sections of the wreck for the first time: the chrysanthemum crest on the bow, a five-meter-diameter propeller, a detached main gun turret. The museum shows this nine-minute video in its theater. The ship lies in roughly 340 meters of water in the East China Sea, where she sank on April 7, 1945, during Operation Ten-Go. That same year, the museum forged a sister-museum partnership with the USS Missouri Memorial Association in Pearl Harbor -- the Missouri being the ship on whose deck Japan signed the instrument of surrender. The pairing of these two institutions, each preserving the flagship of its respective navy, creates a quiet symmetry that the anniversary of the war's end invites visitors to contemplate.

The Yamato has taken on a cultural life far beyond military history. The anime series Space Battleship Yamato reimagined the sunken warship as a spacecraft, and the franchise's parent company C2 Praparat is an official museum partner, funding restoration projects including the great lathe. The museum also houses models of the aircraft carrier Akagi, exhibits on Kure's shipbuilding technology, and a theater showing films about the Imperial Japanese Navy. From a fourth-floor observation terrace, visitors look out across the harbor where warships were once launched by the dozens, now a commercial port where the scale of what was built here lingers in the landscape.