Ancient Web: Admiral Furashita Built an Entire Japanese Navy That Never Existed

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Some hobby websites preserve history. Others preserve the alternate history somebody spent decades inventing because the real fleets were apparently not complicated enough.

Admiral U. Furashita’s Fleet is still docked at CombinedFleet.com.

The page is a catalog of fictional Imperial Japanese Navy vessels created by Craig Burke for his Victory Through Seapower World War II wargaming universe. They did not exist, and the site makes that clear immediately. What makes the collection wonderful is how seriously the joke is documented after that.

There are battleships, battlecruisers, carriers, aircraft cruisers, monitors, seaplane carriers, submarines, and designs that sound just plausible enough to make an incautious reader wonder whether Imperial Japan really considered building them. Each entry can include displacement, armament, aircraft capacity, speed, line drawings, operational reasoning, and the kind of development history normally reserved for actual naval vessels.

Burke's pen name is part of the gag. "Admiral U. Furashita" is a phonetic joke built around what people tended to say about his imaginary ships. He explains that he had been hooked on Pacific naval warfare since childhood, after reading his father's copy of Eugene Burns's Then There Was One. His father had served aboard USS Enterprise as a junior radar officer during early Pacific operations.

From there, decades of naval reading and wargaming turned into a fleet that existed nowhere except paper, counters, imagination, and eventually HTML.

And because the site is still there, the surrounding hobby culture survived with it.

The fleet also carries a useful warning for modern browsing: not every authoritative-looking table on the Web describes a real object. Here the fiction is labeled and the joke is intentional. Twenty-five years of copying information out of context can make that distinction surprisingly important.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.