The Japanese navy designed plans for forming flotillas of new torpedo boats in stead of the heavy and more expensive destroyers. Their opinion was that the tonnage which was allowed by the Naval Treaty of London the best could be used for building torpedo boats.(1) Three of this boats were to be laid down at Osaka and to be armed with 3-4.7” guns and 4 torpedo tubes.
Note
1. This agreement between the United Kingdom, France, Jan, Italy and the United States signed 22 April 1930 had two main purposes namely to regulate the use of submarines during a war and secondly to limit the tonnage of naval shipbuilding. So was Japan allowed to built for instance 12 heavy cruisers with a total tonnage of 108,000 tons.
