Donald Trump has been officially declared a loser.

[Anomalocaris]

No doubt.  Other people think they honor the dishonorable part of their tradition.

What they've done would predictably be taken to be the equivalent of Germany naming a new division after waffen SS division Totenkopf  in the name of honor a valiant tradition to fight against hopeless odds.  The eyebrow would be raised even higher should Germany have also claimed that the waffen SS did nothing wrong, as Japan claims she had done no wrong during or before WWII.

Given that no atrocities have been blamed on the ships in question, I don't think your analogy is apt.

The captain of the hiei, in the name of avenging the loss of his ship, later disobeyed orders from the Japanese army commander in Philippines to evacuate Manila and declare it an open city to avoid excessive civilian casualties.  Instead he ordered his naval personel, many of them surviving crewmen from the Hiei, to rampage through the city and massacred upwards of 20,000 Philippino civilians.

Between 1937 and 1942, when Japan made numerous amphibious landings in its war of conquest first in China and then in the southwest pacific, the naval special landing force, a sort of marine force drawn from sailors of major warships, formed the vanguard infantry of most of the smaller to medium scale landing operations and immediate occupations duties afterwards.   These forces had a reputation for exceptional brutality against civilian in China.  One might deduce the crew of most major Japanese warship which took part in landing operation along Chinese coast between 1937 and 1941 can lay claim to some significant war crimes.