I saw this title while browsing the Hobby Link Japan website. Basically, anytime I place an order for anything hobby or history related, I do a search on “Yorktown CV-5” to see if anything new pops up. The last time I did so, this magazine appeared, so in the shopping cart it went with a set of stencil masks and some paints.
The book is in magazine format, 150 or so glossy pages, with a square-bound spine. Nice quality. The three ship’s of the class, Yorktown, Enterprise and Hornet, are all covered, through photos and text. The photos aren’t anything new to those who’ve studied these ships for any length of time, but there are a couple of shots included that I hadn’t seen before David Doyle’s Yorktown book, which was released a couple of years ago. Besides the well known photos, there is a section on model kits of the ships, a two-page spread of color paintings depicting the Battle of Midway, color depictions of Yorktown’s loss report, and a pull-out sheet drawing of Yorktown in 1939, that looks a lot like the Webb series plan and profile sheets. There is also a nice two-page section of color illustrations of the various aircraft that the Yorktown class carried during the war.
As can be deduced from the cover, all of the text is in Japanese. I used Google Translate on my smart phone to do a few sample translations, and while it does a fairly good job of literal word-for-word translation, it appears to have more of an issue with the formatting of the Japanese language than with other tests I’ve done on Polish, Italian and Spanish.
This is a good book to pick up for the Yorktown class completest. Those versed in reading Japanese may glean information from the text that I wasn’t able to, but regardless, the familiar photos included are well reproduced. The other content, such as aircraft drawings, original paintings, and the Yorktown 1939 plan and profile pull-out, are nice bonuses.
-Devin Poore, May 2020