Talk:Hatsushimo/@comment-93.136.59.17-20150123195757/@comment-25257083-20150123201454

Effectively, Hatsushimo basically survived the war depending on how you look at it. She hit a mine just sixteen days before the war officially ended, yes, but was run aground and scrapped -- she never sunk and for all effects and purposes shared the same fate as the other IJN ships who were scrapped after the war's conclusion. Records of her fate in Japanese describe her as 大破 (taiha) rather than 沈没 (chinbotsu, sunk) -- if we were looking at this from a Kancolle angle, she would have ended the game in "the red" (damage) rather than actually being lost.

The reason it's so high beyond that, though, would have to do with her battle record -- she survived many of the war's major battles, most famously Bounomisaki (Operation Ten-Go), in which she took  no damage and suffered no casualties to her own crew of 430, while rescuing nearly 2400 from the crews of the ships sinking around her. Not even Yukikaze escaped that engagement unscathed.