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Japanese cruiser Izumo

1898 Izumo-class armored cruiser

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionDec 12, 2025
Entity authorityQ736411 ↗
Source-derived summary

Izumo (出雲; sometimes transliterated Idzumo) was the lead ship of her class of armored cruisers (Sōkō jun'yōkan) built for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) in the late 1890s. As Japan lacked the industrial capacity to build such warships itself, the ship was built in Britain. She often served as a flagship and participated in most of the naval battles of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. The ship was lightly damaged during the Battle off Ulsan and the Battle of Tsushima. Izumo was ordered to protect Japanese citizens and interests in 1913 during the Mexican Revolution and was still there when World War I began in 1914.

She was then tasked to search for German commerce raiders and protect Allied shipping off the western coasts of North and Central America. The ship assisted the armored cruiser Asama in early 1915 when she struck a rock off Baja California. In 1917, Izumo became the flagship of the Japanese squadron deployed in the Mediterranean Sea. After the war, she sailed to Great Britain to take control of some ex-German submarines and then escorted them part of the way back to Japan.

The ship spent most of the 1920s as a training ship for naval cadets and became flagship of the IJN's China forces in 1932 during the First Shanghai Incident.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Japanese cruiser Izumo” as 1898 Izumo-class armored cruiser. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Japanese, cruiser and Izumo.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1904, 1905, 1913, 1914—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Japanese, cruiser and Izumo providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Japanese cruiser Izumo”, the useful work is to connect “1898 Izumo-class armored cruiser” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 12, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q736411. Authority coordinates are 34.233, 132.500. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1904, 1905, 1913 and 1914.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Japanese cruiser Izumo primary sources, Japanese cruiser Izumo archive and Japanese research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Japanese cruiser Izumo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.