The dockyard bottleneck behind Japanese capital ships

The Yamato program exposed the narrow industrial base available for very large construction. Kure Naval Arsenal, Mitsubishi's Nagasaki yard, and Yokosuka Naval Arsenal gave Japan only a few sites able to handle ships on this scale. More dry docks, building slips, and long-term capital investment would have expanded Japan's options, but these were projects that needed to begin well before war. The institutional failure is especially striking because military influence over government was already extensive. Under the constitutional system described here, an army or navy refusal to provide a minister could bring down a government, so the services had leverage they did not turn into adequate industrial expansion.