It's a tradition thing. You'll find that most sizable navies, especially with combat history, will recycle names over centuries. In commonwealth navies, for example, battle honors pass down with the name, so you'll see, for example, the current HMCS Calgary's battle honor board on the ship contains battles from WWII and earlier.

Some navies will maintain certain names in perpetuity exactly because of the combat history of earlier namesakes. I doubt the US Navy will ever not have a USS Enterprise in service or planned, USS Hornet is another case in point (Albeit in this case they eventually gave the name to an airplane). Some others will be deleted permanently. If the Royal Navy ever has another HMS Hood, I'll be astounded.

Finally, there's the matter of naming convetion. Looking at the US Navy, for example, it will always name powerful ships after States, slightly less powerful ones after cities, and so on. Similarly the Royal Navy would name frigates and destroyers after towns, cruisers after cities and counties, and so on. Tradition dies hard in the military, and in Navies in particular.

So, for the Japanese in particular, their big warships were named after Provinces. The next series, battlecruisers and heavy cruisers were named after mountains. That tradition has continued with the larger surface combatants in the JMSDF, with the big destroyers (Which, in fairness, displace about the same as a WWII heavy cruiser). Lighter cruisers were named after rivers, which is now the purview of JMSDF frigates. Winds, weather, natural phonomena, those were destroyers in WW2 and today. And so on, you get the idea, I hope.