Liz and Bryn: We Took a Ride on a Japanese Destroyer

The other week, our friend Jun called us up. She is Japanese and works at the Naval base in Maizuru (well, technically, Japan's post-war constitution forbids it from having a military, so it has a self-defense force instead. When I say "navy" what I mean is the naval division of the self-defense force). She had really wanted to come to our wedding in May, but has a wee baby boy, and is very busy with everything she has going on here, so in the end wasn't able to come. She decided that since she couldn't come to the wedding, she wanted to do something for us instead. So anyway, getting back to the phonecall, Jun had bought us two tickets to take a ride on the destroyer JS Mineyuki. The naval base holds yearly(?) public open days, whereby members of the public can purchase tickets to ride on the ships. It was such a cool thing for Jun to do for us!! Neither of us had been on a Japanese destroyer before, so we were well excited about it.

So yesterday we drove to Maizuru to meet Jun and ride on the ship. Three other friends came along too - Eric, Yumi and Kazushi. It was a hot day. Big blue sky, a fairly high degree of humidity causing the horizon to be blurred out, and beads of sweat starting to form on my sun-screen-lathered forehead. Perfect weather for a boat ride. (boat...haha!)

Actually, I'm calling it a "destroyer" but actually it was a destroyer escort ship. The English translation on the information booklet we got called it a destroyer but the Japanese called it an escort ship. It certainly wasn't big enough to be a destroyer. But destroyer is easier to say and type than "escort ship" so I'm going to stick with destroyer, if that's ok...haha

This particular ship, the JS MINEYUKI was commissioned in 1984. It's 130m (426.4ft) long, has a beam of 13.6m (44.6ft), 2950t displacement, 45000 horsepower, max speed about 30 kt. It has a crew of about 200. And in true Japanese fashion, it was made by Mitsubishi.

It has the following armaments:

76mm 62cal single mount rapid fire gun
20mm phalanx CIWS (Close-In Weapon System)
8 cell missile launcher for sea sparrow SAMs (Surface to Air Missiles)
Harpoon SSMs (Surface to Surface Missile) - 2 quad launchers
Anti-submarine rocket launcher
324mm torpedo tubes MK32 (2 triple tube launchers)

It also has a helicopter deck.

It was awesome walking around (fairly) freely on the various decks. We could have gone into the control room, but the queues were too long and so we couldn't be bothered.

At one point we were relaxing on the fore-deck, when they started to give a demonstration of how the rapid-fire gun (cannon) could maneuver. It was great fun to watch it rotate 360 degrees and point up and down... but then it turned and pointed RIGHT AT US!! AND STOPPED!!! It was a bit too unnerving standing there staring into the barrel of a 76mm rapid-fire cannon, so we moved. We were the only people to move from where we were standing! haha... Confucius say "when looking down the barrel of a cannon, move out of the way"