Welcome aboard, and thanks for the reply about HIJMS. When a question has been hanging around for over a year it's a pleasant surprise to receive an answer.

☮ Eclecticology 00:45, 2003 Aug 7 (UTC)

Hi, welcome to Wikipedia! Always good to have more people with historical/naval interests! I have a question for you; you comment that "HIJMS" is an official prefix for Japanese ships, but what is your authority? I've never seen it myself, for instance in Morison, and Google shows that it appears about once on a Japanese website, and once on a Navy page, while the same places have hundreds of refs to Hiryū and the like. Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ships) has the current working assumption, feel free to add your info there and to connected pages.

Stan 21:14, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

you comment that "HIJMS" is an official prefix for Japanese ships, but what is your
authority? I've never seen it myself and Google shows that it appears about once on a
Japanese website, and once on a Navy page

Huh? If I search for the string "HIJMS" in Google (no spaces, no dots), I get 532 hits! I've seen in in a number of books, too. As for other other people not using it, it's true that e.g. Garzke/Dulin don't use in in the books, but then again they don't put USS or HMS in front of other nations' ships either.

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ships) has the current working assumption, feel free to
add your info there and to connected pages.

Will do.

Jnc

532 hits is not really very many, and if you look at the pages they're hitting, they're nearly all amateur efforts; past experience researching this sort of thing for Wikipedia shows you can easily get that many hits for all kinds of erroneous ideas. For instance, the nonsensical "IJN Yamato" gets 639 hits all by itself. One of Wikipedia's strengths is that we research these kinds of things, looking for authorities online, the most-respected books, or contacting experts directly to find out the truth. For instance, if the US or Japanese navies used "HIJMS" themselves, that would be pretty convincing, but while USN web pages use USS a lot, in only one place do we see HIJMS, and every other time "Japanese" is spelled out even when the prefix would be very convenient. That seems awfully strange to me, if HIJMS is the standard prefix. Can you remember any of the books you saw it in? They might offer some leads to the facts of this rather puzzling situation.

Stan 04:27, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

532 hits is not really very many, and if you look at the pages they're hitting, they're nearly
all amateur efforts; past experience researching this sort of thing for Wikipedia shows you
can easily get  that many hits for all kinds of erroneous ideas.

Ah, I wasn't trying to say that that number of hits indicated truth - I was merely being set aback by your contention that Google listed only about two uses of it.

One of Wikipedia's strengths is that we research these kinds of things, looking for
authorities online, the most-respected books, or contacting experts directly to find out the
truth. For instance, if the US or Japanese navies used "HIJMS" themselves, that would
be pretty convincing

If you check out the comment I left on Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ships), I did do some further research for definitive sources - as soon as I saw that the term "HIMJS" had been used by Admiral Togo himself, in his own handwriting no less, I decided that was about as authoritaative as you could get!

while USN web pages use USS a lot, in only one place do we see HIJMS, and every
other time "Japanese" is spelled out even when the prefix would be very convenient.
That seems awfully strange to me, if HIJMS is the standard prefix.

I don't have any explanation for this, except to suppose that HIJMS perhaps falls a little more naturally on those from the other side of the Atlantic. The first place I ever saw it was in a book I read when I was a kid by someone in the Royal Navy (Eric Bush) who commanded a gunboat on the Yangtze in the 30's, and saw a fair amount of the Japanese then (although all his WWII service was in Europe).

Jnc 04:54, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)