Japanese sailors entertain Wellingtonians to a display of martial arts on Pipitea Wharf beside the warship Asama. Photographed by an Evening Post staff photographer 2 June 1932.
Photographs and a report of this visit were published in the Evening Post 3 June 1932.
The occasion was the visit of a Japanese naval training squadron to Wellington, New Zealand. The two warships were the Asama and the Iwate. From Wellington the squadron sailed to Suva, Fiji.
Asama (淺間) was the lead ship of her class of armored cruisers (Sōkō jun’yōkan) built for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) in the late 1890s. As Japan lacked the industrial capacity to build such warships herself, the ship was built in Britain. She served in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 during which she participated in the Battle of Chemulpo Bay and the Battle of the Yellow Sea without damage, although her luck did not hold out during the Battle of Tsushima. Early in World War I, Asama unsuccessfully searched for German commerce raiders until she was severely damaged when she ran aground off the Mexican coast in early 1915. Repairs took over two years to complete and she was mainly used as a training ship for the rest of her career. The ship made a total of 12 training cruises before she was crippled after running aground again in 1935. Asama then became a stationary training ship until she was broken up in 1946–1947.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_cruiser_Asama
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