Ashigara

Overview

Ashigara is a ship girl representing the third ship of the Myoukou-class heavy cruisers in the web browser game Kantai Collection and its media derivatives. Based on her real-world Imperial Japanese Navy counterpart, she is portrayed as a fiery, battle-hungry warrior driven by an unyielding pursuit of victory. Known by her historical epithet "Hungry Wolf," she serves as a dependable high-speed heavy cruiser who approaches every deployment with intense enthusiasm.

Appearance

Ashigara has wavy long brown hair bound by a white hairband, paired with brown eyes. She wears a purple military uniform jacket with puffy short sleeves, a black pencil skirt, white pantyhose, and elbow-length white gloves. A scarf decorated with international signal flag patterns is wrapped around her neck, and a chest badge features a surface radar silhouette. Her rigging consists of twin 20.3 cm gun mounts on her shoulders, split bridge structures on her elbow gloves, a third twin mount on her right glove, and quad 61 cm torpedo tubes mounted around her waist and thigh straps. In her Kai Ni form, she gains a headset and a prominent snaggletooth.

Personality

Ashigara is defined by her fierce, passionate demeanor and a constant desire for combat and victory. Her combat mindset is so pervasive that she actively shouts threats at enemies in her sleep. Despite her hardened attitude, she unexpectedly lets out cat-like cries when sustaining minor damage. She is obsessed with eating cutlets (katsu) for good luck due to the wordplay on "victory," frequently cooking over a hundred pork cutlets at a time for her fleetmates to the point of causing them heartburn. While fan depictions and certain media adaptations play up a joke about her being an unmarried woman eager for marriage, her core official characterization remains strictly focused on her love for fighting.

Abilities

Ashigara commands powerful firepower and torpedo strikes, specializing in surface naval engagements with her twin 20.3 cm gun mounts and quad 61 cm torpedo tubes. She possesses high-speed navigation capabilities, allowing her to maneuver swiftly while maintaining steady offense. During combat operations such as the Reigou Operation, she demonstrated exceptional damage control by successfully extinguishing an onboard fire caused by a bomb hit without detonating her oxygen torpedoes, subsequently carrying out a sustained 20-minute shore bombardment.

Background

Ashigara was created based on the real-world Myoukou-class heavy cruiser of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Historically, when she attended the British Coronation Fleet Review in 1937, her heavily armed design earned her the nickname "Hungry Wolf" from foreign observers. Throughout World War II, she was deployed across key naval engagements, including the Battle of the Java Sea and the Reigou Operation. In June 1945, while transporting army troops and supplies, she was ambushed and sunk by British torpedoes in the Bangka Strait. In Kantai Collection, she is available as a main-line heavy cruiser, receiving her "Kai Ni" second upgrade in December 2014 to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Reigou Operation.

Relationships

Ashigara deeply admires the eldest Myoukou-class sister, Myoukou, striving to match her strength while fearing her long lectures. She shares close sisterly ties with Nachi and Haguro. She gets along remarkably well with the light cruiser Ooyodo despite their different ship types, having served together alongside destroyers like Kasumi during the Reigou Operation. Historically, when Ashigara sank, the destroyer Kamikaze rescued more than a thousand of her surviving crew members; this shared history is reflected in their warm interactions within the game.

Trivia

Her name originates from the Ashigara mountain region located along the border of Kanagawa and Shizuoka prefectures. The pattern on her neck scarf represents international signal flags, a homage to the flags raised when her real-world counterpart attended the 1937 Coronation Fleet Review in Spithead. Her recurring gag of frying massive amounts of pork cutlet curry stems from Japanese wordplay where "katsu" (cutlet) sounds like "to win." The name Ashigara was later inherited by the Atago-class guided missile destroyer JS Ashigara of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force.