Talk:General Discussion/@comment-180.246.53.220-20151101082551/@comment-1637496-20151102221631

>These would be my best guess for the Coastal Defence Ships, since they're the only ones build after 1920, plus they were build by Kawasaki for the Royal Thai Navy, one of Japan's allies.

Kaibokan refers to two different things in Japanese, initially they were obsolete battleships and cruisers assigned to guard duty, that's the closest to the classical coastal defence ship concept seen elsewhere except they were not purpose built. The same name was used for small patrol ships built in 1939, the Shimushu class, which became the basis of the wartime ASW corvette-like escorts. In 1942 they changed the classification system, moving the kaibokan outside the gunkan (warship) group and assigning the obsolete cruisers to either the 1st class cruiser class or the auxiliary training ships one. From that point kaibokan were only the corvette-like 900 tons circa ASW escorts.

In Kancolle Kaibokan refers almost certainly to the latter typology, back in the days a magazine article said that they would be "more loli-like than submarines" to reflect their small displacement.