In English anyway, the Japanese submarines are “I-[some number].” Did the Japanese actually use the letter “I” in their names, and if so, why not some similar Japanese word, syllable, whatever?
We learn that Midway Island was referred to as “Island AF” in Japanese communications. Presumably the word “island” was a Japanese word or code word for the same, but why would the Japanese be referring to some location with the letters “A” as opposed to some Japanese coding.
[I don’t speak Japanese, but I am familiar with some of their syllabary conventions.]
The US had numbered their boats before & during the First World War (for example, the “S” class boats), but during the interwar period they changed to a naming scheme (“fish” names).
Edit: Us westerners translate the specific kanji(?) character to “I”, but I don’t know what the Japanese call the character… or if it holds the equivelant phonetic use in Japanese… sorry.
It is " 伊", but on the hull they would paint the katakana character “イ” which reflects the pronunciation of " 伊".
Since there were other types of submersible craft using “RO” (呂) and ”HA” (波) as part of their nomenclature, it is clear that these designations were chosen on the basis of the old Japanese “alphabet” (which was a poem that contained all of the syllabary), since I-RO-HA are the first three syllables of the poem.
So basically, it is an old Japanese version of A, as in ABC.
Regarding Midway, since the Japanese were not unfamiliar with letters (and since there is no kana that corresponds to “F”), I would imagine that they simply used random pairs of letters as a coded designation.
Here is an extra tidbit on Japanese nomenclature: You may have noticed that the names of specific aircraft models and tank models may sometimes include the term “Type 97,” “Type 98”, etc. The number is derived from the last two digits of the Japanese imperial year, numbered from 660 BC. Therefore, “Type 98” entered service in 2598 (1938), etc.
I have always been glad that the last digit of the Western calendar and the imperial calendar were identical; it makes conversion easy.
This means that 1940 was the year 2600 under the imperial calendar. So now you can see where a famous Japanese fighter aircraft got its name, if you didn’t happen to know already.
I have a question from an observation I’ve made from the designation of IJN aircraft. The Japanese system seems to follow the same letter-number-letter system that was used by the USN in the same time period. Is this something that was adopted by Western Intelligence and then became widespread, or did the Japanese use the same system.
When Japan decided to modernise, they decided to learn and emulate the methods of the strongest European powers. (Great Britain (Navy), France & Prussia (Army).)
It’s not surprising that they planned and organised their militaries with similar meticulus methods.