Japanese fleet organization was partly frozen in the command world of the Russo-Japanese War and First World War. The Royal Navy increasingly delegated task-force authority to captains, commodores, and rear admirals, while Japanese formations remained comparatively vice-admiral-heavy. That structure matched a plan built around centrally controlled, dispersed attrition groups and repeated a model that had already worked for Japan. The system cannot be reduced either to timeless Bushido or to a copied German or British hierarchy. It was a specifically Japanese fusion of early twentieth-century warrior culture and foreign organizational ideas, which outsiders can misread by noticing only the element they already recognize.
Notable Point · 1:30:33-1:35:02
The older command model behind Japan's dispersed scouting groups
Japan's vice-admiral-heavy structure preserved lessons from the Russo-Japanese War and fused native and imported ideas into a system suited to its planned attritional groups.