Ryota Ikeda (born 1998) is a Japanese military historian and nonfiction writer. He studied modern and contemporary Japanese history at Senshu University and specializes in the former Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, particularly intelligence and code warfare. His research combines documentary evidence with interviews of veterans and bereaved families. While still a university student, he encountered testimony from a former naval aviator who had flown aboard a previously overlooked third aircraft during the mission in which Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was killed, leading to his first book in 2023. His representative work, “Senkan Yamato: Saigo no Shinshōgen,” uses previously unpublished recordings of 1971 interviews with commanders and staff officers involved in Yamato’s final mission to reconstruct how the Okinawa sortie was authorized and how the battleship came to be portrayed as the vanguard of a nationwide suicidal defense.
