Yokosuka Navy Burger

Yokosuka Navy Burger (ヨコスカネイビーバーガー) - Food in Japan

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Hamburgers are very popular in Japan. There are many restaurants that sell hamburgers, such as McDonald’s and Burger King.Did you know that there is a very tasty and special hamburger in Yokosuka City, Kanagawa Prefecture, called the Yokosuka Navy Burger? If you are ever in Kanagawa Prefecture, the Yokosuka Navy Burger is one you should try.

So, what kind of burger is it?

Yokosuka Navy Burger is different from the hamburgers you usually eat. Its taste differs completely from burgers that Japanese restaurants create. The flavor stands apart from Japanese-style burgers that combine various ingredients and sauces for local tastes.

The Navy Burger is different from the hamburgers you usually eat.This simple hamburger preserves the original flavor of the beef. The recipe uses 100 percent lean beef as the only ingredient, creating what resembles a steak on a bun. Diners can top their hamburger with fresh onions and tomatoes, and add mustard and ketchup to taste, following the traditional American style.

The hamburger was created in the U.S. more than 100 years ago, and after spreading throughout the country, by the early 20th century it had become a valuable menu item that the U.S. Navy could easily eat while on duty.

In the late 1940s, various American cultures spread from the U.S. Navy to Yokosuka, and hamburgers were served with jazz music and spread to the general public.

On November 19, 2008, the U.S. Naval Base Yokosuka provided a recipe for a traditional U.S. Navy hamburger.

The city of Yokosuka developed a new brand of hamburger based on this recipe, named Yokosuka Navy Burger, and the authentic taste of the hamburger is now available at stores around the base.

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DVIDS - News - The History of the Yokosuka Navy Burger: Part II

In November 2008, the commander of Naval Region Japan, Rear Admiral James D. Kelly, gave the service’s official hamburger recipe to Yokosuka Mayor Ryoichi Kabaya as a symbol of friendship between the U.S. Navy and City of Yokosuka. Kabaya later announced the recipe would be the foundation of the now trademarked Yokosuka Navy Burger and shared it with participating restaurants. Each restaurant then shared their variation to an unimaginable number of Japanese TV shows, photographers, tourists, local residents and Shore Patrol for the last 15 years.

This is all well-known.

A simple Google search of “Yokosuka Navy Burger” would return a few dozen pages of news stories, blog posts and marketing pieces all seemingly paraphrasing the same 150 or so words. It’s so heavily repeated even ChatGPT struggles to generate a different response no matter how many times it’s asked to write in the style of various publications.

Even the last part of this two-part series states the origins of the Yokosuka Navy Burger in 2008. And it’s true in the absolute, most definite terms. The Yokosuka Navy Burger is a trademark that is easily traced to 2008.

But it would seem Yokosuka’s hamburger story would be older than David Tyree’s “Helmet Catch.”

(Much more at the link above)....

Eyewitness to 1945 Yokosuka Air Raid

https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/original/perspectives/20250712-269270/

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Fumi Takahashi was 15 years old when she experienced the U.S. aerial bombing of the Yokosuka military port in Kanagawa Prefecture on July 18, 1945. The air raid near the end of the Pacific War targeted the battleship Nagato, which was anchored in front of her workplace.

Takahashi, from Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, was mobilized into a student labor unit and was at the Yokosuka military port that day. She escaped to a basement and survived, and later beheld the tragic sight of the heavily damaged Nagato, which had been regarded as the symbol of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Combined Fleet.

Her interview with The Japan News was the first time Takahashi has spoken to the media about those moments of terror 80 years ago.

“When I waved to the sailors on the Nagato, which was moored at the quay, they would wave back with signal flags.” Now 95 years old, Takahashi still vividly remembers the scene at Yokosuka military port.

Takahashi and 281 other third-year students from Iwaki Girls High School, now Fukushima Prefectural Iwaki Sakuragaoka High School, were mobilized as student labor in November 1944 and departed for Yokosuka. Takahashi was assigned to the Yokosuka Naval Arsenal, where she began living in a dormitory with four others. Ten people from two teams, including Takahashi, went to a small hut directly above the dock every day. “We scraped the sides of metal boxes and painted numbers on them with green paint,” Takahashi recalls. Information was strictly controlled, and even now, she does not know what the boxes were used for.

The Nagato was moored in front of her workplace. It had been the flagship of the Combined Fleet during the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 8, 1941 (Japan time), and was a symbol of the Japanese Navy. For Takahashi, it was also the ship aboard which her elementary school teacher had served, and its imposing presence filled her with emotion.

The U.S. military, which had occupied Saipan and Tinian in the Mariana Islands, began full-scale aerial bombings on the Japanese mainland around November 1944. The largest air raid on Yokosuka, with hundreds of U.S. bombers, began on the afternoon of July 18, 1945.

“I had finished eating my lunch and was working in the afternoon,” Takahashi recalls. A loud alarm sounded, and they were told to evacuate to the basement. When a hatch under the floor was opened, a rope and iron ladder leading to the basement of the dock stretched straight down. The dimly lit interior of the dock seemed to lead to the “bottomless pit.”

When 10 students reached the second landing halfway down, the ground suddenly shook violently. “Mother!” “God!” everyone screamed. A bomb had fallen near their workplace. Takahashi recalled, “The ladder swayed like a swing, and I thought, ‘This is it.’”

After a while, there was a loud voice from above saying, “Come up!” When they climbed up and came out, the workplace was completely destroyed. The students jumped out of the broken windows. Some fell onto green paint that was splattered about, and their clothes became covered in it.

The students were told to “go to the mountain air-raid shelter” and started running. Takahashi said, “A young soldier from the Kaiten human torpedo unit appeared and carried me on his back. Nine others followed behind, crying.”

As dusk fell, Takahashi stepped outside the air-raid shelter to find the landscape completely transformed. There were large holes in the ground, and muddy water was flowing everywhere. When she approached the dock where the workplace was located, the Nagato was severely damaged and listing. Many of the ships that had been anchored there had sunk and were nowhere to be seen.

According to the book “Yokosuka,” an official history of the city, the Nagato was hit by bombs on its bridge and other areas. More than 40 people, including members of the Nagato’s crew, are said to have been killed in this air raid.

On August 15, the war ended. Three days later, Takahashi boarded a crowded train with her classmates and returned to her hometown.

At the end of the war, the Nagato was the only Japanese battleship still operational. After being seized by the U.S. military, it was used as a target ship in atomic bomb tests conducted at Bikini Atoll in July 1946 and sunk.

Takahashi agreed to an interview because her children told her, “With fewer and fewer people testifying about the war, Mom has a responsibility to tell the story.”

Amid postwar turmoil, she worked as a substitute teacher at an elementary school for about two years before getting married. She raised three children and was blessed with four grandchildren.

Her house, severely damaged in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and later reconstructed with its original materials, is over 130 years old. Small shrines and a Buddhist altar are lined up in her home, and every morning she offers water and rice and prays for those who died in the Pacific War, saying in her mind: “The war was terrible. Please rest in peace.” Then, with the hope that war will never happen again, she repeats, “Daijobu, daijobu [It’s okay, it’s okay].” For Takahashi, it’s a mantra to say, “It’s going to be all right.”

Yokosuka Ohka MXY-7 Cherry Blossom / Baka / MXY-11 / Model 11 Cherry Blossom / K-1

Yokosuka Ohka MXY-7 Cherry Blossom / Baka / MXY-11 / Model 11 Cherry Blossom / K-1 – All Aero

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Japan’s naval officers, in the summer of 1944, were faced with the almost sure knowledge that their country’s defeat was simply a matter of time. Even before Vice Admiral Ohnishi ordered the creation of the Kamikaze Special Attack Force in October 1944, some naval officers were seeing suicide attacks as the only way to defeat the Allied fleets. One of these men was a transport pilot of the 405th Kokutai, Ensign Mitsuo Ohta. He conceived the idea of a rocket-propelled suicide attack plane, and with the aid of personnel from the University of Tokyo’s Aeronautical Research Institute, he drafted preliminary plans for his brainchild. In August 1944 he submitted his drawings to the Naval Air Technical Arsenal at Yokosuka. The Navy decided that Ensign Ohta’s idea had merit, and so the Arsenal was instructed to prepare a set of detailed blueprints – the engineers involved were Masao Yamana, Tadanao Mitsugi, and Rokuro Hattori. The Ohka (Cherry Blossom) was, in effect, a manned anti-shipping cruise missile of the Pacific War.

The MXY7, as the design was named, was intended as a coastal-defense or anti-invasion weapon, launched by a “parent” aircraft. Once released by its “mother” ship – usually a G4M twin-engined bomber – the MXY7 would glide downwards, and once the pilot had selected a target, the weapon would accelerate to attack speed using the power of three solid-fuel rockets mounted in the tail. These rockets could be fired one at a time or all three simultaneously. Theoretically, when it was at its terminal velocity, the MXY7 would be virtually impossible to stop, and only pilot error could cause it to miss. This small but lethal aircraft was to be built of wood and non-critical metal alloys, utilizing unskilled labor, and as it would be flown by pilots with only limited aerial experience, flight instruments were to be kept to a bare minimum and good maneuverability was required to achieve accuracy in flying and aiming the “manned missile”.

The actual aircraft itself looked like a torpedo to which wings and twin tail surfaces had been added. Barely 20 feet long, and with wings spanning just over 16½ feet, its sliding canopy was hump-backed. In front of the canopy was a ring sight, with a bead sight in front of that, for precise aiming when in the terminal dive on a target. The Ohka was built by unskilled workers using as much non-strategic material as possible. The fuselage was a standard aluminium structure, but the wings were made of moulded plywood covered in fabric. Cockpit instrumentation consisted of only four instruments: a compass, an airspeed indicator, an altimeter and an inclinometer for turn indication.

Ten MXY7s were completed by the end of September 1944. Unpowered flight trials began at Sagami the following month, and in November the first powered flight was made at Kashima. The MXY7 was accepted for Navy service under the name Navy Special Attacker Ohka Model 11. It was powered by a battery of three Type 4 Mark 1 Model 20 rockets, which produced 1,764 pounds of thrust, combined, for 8 to 10 seconds of powered flight. Performance measured during an unmanned flight at Kashima in January 1945 indicated that the Ohka could reach a top unpowered speed of 288 mph and a top powered speed of 403 mph, both speeds being attained at a height of 11,485 feet.

The Imperial Navy didn’t bother to wait for all test results to come in; production began with the first ten Ohka Model 11s in September 1944, and 755 were built by the end of March 1945, when production of this variant ceased. One hundred and fifty-five were built by the Naval Air Technical Arsenal at Yokosuka, and 600 more by the First Naval Air Arsenal at Kasumigaura; Nippon Aircraft Ltd. and Fuji Aircraft Ltd were subcontractors for the wings and tail units. But barely a hundred of them were actually used in operations.