Japan's Self-Defense Forces (2026)

Overview

Japan’s Self-Defense Forces covers all ships and aircraft in Japanese service from 1955 to the current day. It is designed as a sourcebook for Harpoon, fifth edition, but it can also be used as a general reference. Organized as a collection of annexes, Annexes and B provide statistics on ships and aircraft respectively as first built, and any modifications over time, sometimes many times. Annexes C and on give detailed weapons and sensors characteristics, including guns, missiles, antisubmarine weapons, torpedoes, mines, airborne ordnance, radars, sonars, and data links, with all the information needed to use them in a Harpoon scenario.

The book also provides information on land-based surface-to-air missiles systems, coastal defense missiles and their battery organization. Supplemental annexes list ship classifications and factors used to convert weapons and sensor information into game data.

As a bonus, in addition to having information on the characteristics of Japanese ships, planes, weapons and sensors, it includes data on the how the ships are organized into flotillas and divisions, and aircraft into squadrons, and where they all are based. Another map shows Japan’s air defense regions.

—description from the publisher