Kashima (鹿島) was the second vessel completed of the three light cruisers in the Katori class, which served with the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II. The ship was named after the noted Shinto shrine Kashima Jingu in Ibaraki prefecture, Japan.
Kashima was completed at the Mitsubishi Yokohama shipyards on 31 May 1940 and was initially based at Kure Naval Base in the Inland Sea.
After the war, the American authorities used Kashima as a repatriation transport. A deck house was constructed around her main mast, and the barrels of her guns were sawn off.
From 10 October 1945 – 12 November 1946 Kashima made a total of 12 voyages to New Guinea, the Solomon islands, Marshall islands, Singapore, French Indochina, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand and Hong Kong, transporting some 5,800 former Imperial Japanese Army troops and POWs back to Japan.
Between 15 November 1946 and 15 June 1947, Kashima was broken up for scrap at Nagasaki.
Character[]
Appearance[]
- Kashima has blue or gray eyes with a tsurime style, and wavy silver hair tied into twintails, with a payot in the front.
- Similar to her sister-ship, she wears a white jacket with black buttons and trim, along with gold epaulettes and a red neckerchief. She wears whitegloves, has a pleated charcoal miniskirt, black kneehigh socks, and sandal-like shoes. She wears a beret with two flag-like flaps of cloth accentuating it.
- Kashima's combat gear involves a large pair of binoculars, her depth charge launcher carried like a briefcase, her bridge carried on a strap like a purse, and a back-mounted weapons platform with twin searchlights, and a large and small pair of twin-cannon turrets.
- The colored flags on Kashima's hat are the maritime signal flags for Uniform (above), and Yankee (below). Taken together in that order, they form the signal flag Uniform Yankee, with the intended message of "I am training; keep clear of me".
Personality[]
- Perhaps even more than Katori, she has a highly feminine personality. Her verbal habit is to end most of her lines in "ufufu", which is usually seen as a coquettish laugh.
- Several of her in-game lines also paint her as someone who wistfully longs for peace, a reference to both the fact that she, as a training vessel, isn't much of a warrior and lacks any confidence in her combat ability, and the fact that the historic ship was commissioned during the peace before the war, engaged in essentially no combat the whole duration of the war, and was used as a repatriation vessel after the war before being scrapped in Japan. (Personality-wise, this makes her similar to Inazuma.)
- Her in-game lines portray her as lacking in self-confidence and happiest when cooking or brewing coffee for others. Because of this, she's shown to be the gentle sort compared to Katori's flanderized sadist.