Aikoku Maru was laid down at the Mitsui Tamano shipyards in Okayama Prefecture on 29 December 1938. She was designed to be a combined passenger liner / cargo vessel for the Osaka Shosen Lines’s regularly scheduled services to South America. Provisionally named Kyoto, the design for the new vessel was to have boasted of luxurious suite rooms. The vessel was built with large government subsidies provided from 1936 to encourage the production of large, high-speed transports and tankers, which could be quickly converted to military use in times of conflict. The vessel was launched on 25 April 1940, and was named Aikoku Maru at that time.