Japanese transport ship Hakuyo Maru (1942)

Kobe is the capital city of Hyōgo Prefecture Japan. With a population around 1.5 million, Kobe is Japan's seventh-largest city and the third-largest port city after Tokyo and Yokohama. It is located in Kansai region, which makes up the southern side of the main island of Honshū, on the north shore of Osaka Bay. It is part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kyoto. The Kobe city centre is located about 35 km (22 mi) west of Osaka and 70 km (43 mi) southwest of Kyoto.

Osaka is a designated city in the Kansai region of Honshu in Japan. It is the capital of and most populous city in Osaka Prefecture, and the third most populous city in Japan, following Special wards of Tokyo and Yokohama. With a population of 2.7 million in the 2020 census, it is also the largest component of the Keihanshin Metropolitan Area, which is the second-largest metropolitan area in Japan and the 10th largest urban area in the world with more than 19 million inhabitants.

The Kuril Islands or Kurile Islands are a volcanic archipelago administered as part of Sakhalin Oblast in the Russian Far East. The islands stretch approximately 1,300 km (810 mi) northeast from Hokkaido in Japan to Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, separating the Sea of Okhotsk from the north Pacific Ocean. There are 56 islands and many minor islets. The Kuril Islands consist of the Greater Kuril Chain and the Lesser Kuril Chain. They cover an area of around 10,503.2 square kilometres (4,055.3 sq mi), with a population of roughly 20,000.

Otaru is a city and port in Shiribeshi Subprefecture, Hokkaido, Japan, northwest of Sapporo. The city faces Ishikari Bay and the Sea of Japan, and has long served as the main port of the bay. With its many historical buildings, Otaru is a popular tourist destination. Because it is a 25-minute drive from Sapporo, it has recently grown as a bedroom community.

The Japanese destroyer Kamikaze was the lead ship of nine Kamikaze-class destroyers built for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) during the 1920s. At the beginning of the Pacific War in December 1941, the ship was assigned to the Ōminato Guard District. She remained in northern Japanese waters until mid-1942 when she participated in the Aleutian Islands Campaign. Kamikaze continued to patrol northern Japanese waters until early 1945 when she was transferred to the Singapore area.

The Etorofu-class escort ships were a group of fourteen kaibōkan escort vessels built for the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II. Eight of the fourteen ships were sunk during the war. The class was also referred to by internal Japanese documents as the "Modified A-class" coastal defense vessel .

USS Seal (SS-183), a Salmon-class submarine, was the second ship of the United States Navy to be named for the seal, a sea mammal valued for its skin and oil.

The geographic coordinate system (GCS) is a spherical or ellipsoidal coordinate system for measuring and communicating positions directly on the Earth as latitude and longitude. It is the simplest, oldest and most widely used of the various spatial reference systems that are in use, and forms the basis for most others. Although latitude and longitude form a coordinate tuple like a cartesian coordinate system, the geographic coordinate system is not cartesian because the measurements are angles and are not on a planar surface.