"The battleship Yamato of the Imperial Japanese Navy has been one of the favourite icons for artists in Japanese popular culture since the 1950s. Many novels, manga, films, anime, and videogames have featured the Yamato literally or symbolically. Its technological achievement as the world's largest battleship, together with the tragedy of its destruction and the deaths of over 3,000 crewmembers on a suicidal mission near the end of the Pacific War in 1945, have intrigued many people in postwar Japan.
The Yamato and its last mission were first popularised by one of its former officers, Yoshida Mitsuru, in articles and books he published in the early 1950s. Based on one of these books, Senkan Yamato no Saigo (Requiem for Battleship Yamato), a war film titled Senkan Yamato (Battleship Yamato, Dir. Abe Yutaka) was released in 1953, becoming one of the hit films of that year. In the 1960s, the Yamato attracted young Japanese males through boy's magazines along with the boom in senki-mono (war memoirs), as war machines and heroes were popularised in nonfictional articles and manga stories (Takahashi 2004; Sano 2009). In the mid-1970s, the Yamato was resurrected in a feature-length animated film and a TV anime series called Uchû Senkan Yamato (Space Battleship Yamato, Dir. Nishizaki Yoshinobu; Matsumoto Leiji), which appealed to many Japanese teenagers. The next two decades were relatively quiet, but there were some notable works featuring the Yamato, including a live-action war film titled Rengô Kantai (Combined Fleets, Dir. Matsubayashi Shûe) and a manga series, Chinmoku no Kantai (Silent Service, Kawaguchi Kaiji). After 2000, there was another boom: a film, Otokotachi no Yamato/YAMATO (Men of the Yamato, Dir. Satô Jun'ya) was released in December 2005, and became one of the hit films of 2006. Also in 2005, the Kure Maritime Museum (Kure-shi Kaiji Rekishi Kagakukan), popularly known as the Yamato Museum, was founded in Kure-city, Hiroshima, where the battleship was built and based. One million and seven thousands people visited it in its first year.1 In 2009, a new anime, Uchû Senkan Yamato: Fukkatsu-hen (Space Battleship Yamato: Resurrection, Dir. Nishizaki Yoshinobu) was released as a feature film.2 In addition, the original story of Space Battleship Yamato was remade as a live-action film, SPACE BATTLESHIP Yamato (Dir. Yamazaki Takashi) in 2010, and it was also remade as a DVD series, Uchû Senkan Yamato 2199 (Dir. Izubuchi Yutaka) in 2012.3
Why has the image of the Yamato captured the interest of the Japanese for so long? Some scholars have already examined fictional representations of Yamato to discuss postwar Japanese nationalism and politics. The political messages that they have found in them are diverse, from conservative nationalism to left-wing pacifism, though they still do not answer the basic question of its enduring popularity. This article examines this complexity and the durability of the Yamato as a political icon in popular culture, focusing on the connection between Requiem for Battleship Yamato by Yoshida and two prominent fictional versions, Space Battleship Yamato and Silent Service. This article contends that the historical facts of the Yamato, such as its technological achievement and crewmembers' tragic deaths, as well as the message in Yoshida's literary work, tend to inspire artists in popular culture to use the image of the Yamato and fuse various kinds of nationalism in their Yamato-featured works as a way of restoring Japan's national pride when the nation faces a crisis. This is the reason why the Yamato has attracted the attention of so many popular artists and people in Japan for such a long time…"
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Amicalement
Armand
's first experience with 1:4800 scale naval models.
