Why Japan paired large cruisers with Yamato construction

Why would Japan replace battlecruisers with large cruisers while Britain planned 12-inch cruisers alongside older heavy ships?

Large cruisers could use yards and infrastructure separate from the capital-ship program, leaving the biggest facilities concentrated on Yamato-class and still larger battleships.

Shipyard size and availability help explain why apparently overlapping classes could coexist. Large cruisers could be constructed in facilities that were unsuitable for Yamato-scale hulls. Japan could therefore preserve its largest building positions for an ambitious capital-ship program while still adding fast, heavily armed cruisers elsewhere. The resulting force looked more coherent in theory than it might have proved in practice.