Yamato Museum (Kure Maritime Museum)

This guide to the Yamato Museum in Kure, near Hiroshima, opens on August 8, 1940, when the largest battleship ever built slipped into the water inside a covered dry dock with no crowd allowed to watch. It traces why the navy chose this mountain-ringed harbor for secrecy back in the 1880s, and the lengths workers went to afterward: cranes rebuilt for loads never handled before, windows planked over, newspapers censored so thoroughly that American intelligence still had the ship's armament wrong months later. Stand in the museum lobby, where that long-kept secret is finally on display.