Word: akagi
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...night the force sailed Author Fuchida was knocked out of his air command by an emergency appendectomy. But early on the morning of June 4, he climbed shakily to the flight deck of the flagship Akagi to see his boys launch the first strike on Midway. He watched the carriers easily brush off first retaliatory attacks by land-based Marine and Army planes. Then: "A lookout screamed 'Hell-divers!' I looked up to see three black enemy planes plummeting toward our ship. Some of our machine guns managed to fire a few frantic bursts at them...
...carrier-and-battleship fleet of Japan might have won. But the task force sent by the pennywise, pound-foolish admirals was defeated by a U.S. task force which, though inferior in quantity, was superior in quality. The enemy lost the pride of his carrier fleet: the big Kaga and Akagi, the smaller Hiryu and Soryu...
Three Victims. One of her biggest successes came in the desperate Battle of Midway when her dive-bombers, torpedo planes and fighters roared in with four separate attacks on the big Jap invasion fleet. Eight bombs smashed into the enemy carrier Kaga, three more on the Akagi; additional hits in a later attack, sent both to the bottom. On the same day 17 dive-bombers helped spike the carrier Soryu with six hits and plumped two more on a battleship; the Soryu burned cheerily and slipped beneath the surface with the polite hissing noise characteristic of Japanese etiquette...
...training their men, to a point which U.S. trainers would probably think insane. In 1930 naval maneuvers near Saishuto (according to a Japanese officer's article in the Spanish Revista de Aeronautica), Japan's present Commander of Combined Fleets Admiral Yamamoto, then captain of the carrier Akagi, launched 30 torpedo planes in a gale to give the men practice in heavy-weather launchings. They all launched, but not one got back to the ship...
Furthermore, U.S. carriers are bigger, have more hitting power than their Japanese counterparts. Example: the Lexington had 90 planes, almost as many as the Kaga and Akagi combined. Thus, while the loss of a single carrier may hit the U.S. harder than a similar loss hits Japan, three or four U.S. carriers in the Pacific would outweigh the known remainder of the Japanese fleet in plane power...