was a central-battery ironclad built for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) in the 1870s. She was built in the United Kingdom because such ships could not yet be constructed in Japan. The ship participated in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 where she was damaged during the Battle of the Yalu River in 1894 and participated in the Battle of Weihaiwei in early 1895. She collided with two Japanese ships during a storm and sank in 1897. She was refloated the following year and repaired. Fusō played a minor role in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 and was reclassified as a coast defense ship after the war. She was struck from the Navy List in 1908 and sold for scrap the following year.
Background
Tensions between Japan and China heightened after the former launched its punitive expedition against Taiwan in May 1874 in retaliation of the murder of a number of shipwrecked sailors by the Paiwan aborigines. China inquired into the possibility of buying ironclad warships from Great Britain and Japan was already negotiating with the Brazilian government about the purchase of the ironclad Independencia then under construction in Britain. The Japanese terminated the negotiations with the Brazilians in October after the ship was badly damaged upon launching and the expeditionary force was about to withdraw from Taiwan. The crisis illustrated the need to reinforce the IJN and a budget request was submitted that same month by Acting Navy Minister Kawamura Sumiyoshi for ¥3.9–4.2 million to purchase three warships from abroad. This was rejected as too expensive and a revised request of ¥2.3 million was approved later that month. No Japanese shipyard was able to build ships of this size so they were ordered from Great Britain. Nothing was done until March 1875 when Kawamura proposed to buy one ironclad for half of the money authorized and use the rest for shipbuilding and gun production at the Yokosuka Shipyard. No response was made by the Prime Minister's office before the proposal was revised to use all of the allocated money to buy three ships, one iron-hulled armored warship and two armored corvettes of composite construction to be designed by the prominent British naval architect Sir Edward Reed, formerly the Chief Constructor of the Royal Navy. Reed would also supervise the construction of the ships for an honorarium of five percent of the construction cost. The Prime Minister's office approved the revised proposal on 2 May and notified the Japanese consul, Ueno Kagenori, that navy officers would be visiting to negotiate the contract with Reed.
Commander Matsumura Junzō arrived in London on 21 July and gave Reed the specifications for the ships. Reed responded on 3 September with a proposal that exceeded the amount allocated in the budget. Ueno signed the contracts for all three ships on 24 September despite this issue because Reed was scheduled to depart for a trip to Russia and the matter had to be concluded before his departure. Ueno had informed the Navy Ministry about the costs before signing, but Kawamura's response to postpone the order for the armored frigate did not arrive until 8 October. The totals for all three contracts came to £433,850 or ¥2,231,563 and did not include the armament. These were ordered from Krupp with a 50 percent down payment of £24,978. The government struggled to provide the necessary money even though the additional expenses had been approved by the Prime Minister's office on 5 June 1876, especially as more money was necessary to fully equip the ships for sea and to provision them for the delivery voyage to Japan.
Description
The design of Fusō was based on a scaled-down version of , an central-battery ironclad, familiar to the Japanese as the flagship of the Royal Navy China Station from 1871 to 1875. The ship was long between perpendiculars and had a beam of . She had a forward draft of and drew aft. She displaced and had a crew of 26 officers and 269 enlisted men.
Propulsion
Fusō had a pair of two-cylinder, double-expansion trunk steam engines made by John Penn and Sons, each driving a two-bladed propeller. Eight cylindrical boilers provided steam to the engine at a working pressure of . The engines were designed to produce to give the ships a speed of . During her sea trials on 3 January 1878, she reached a maximum speed of from . The ship carried a maximum of of coal, enough to steam at . The three-masted ironclad was barque-rigged and had a sail area of . To reduce wind resistance while under sail alone, the funnel was semi-retractable.