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Explosion of battleship Yamato with
three escort destroyers to left (April 7, 1945)
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Battleship Yamato's Contradictions
Great Yamato, of all lands most supreme,
Enclosed by ranks of verdant banks
on surrounding hills
Great Yamato—unmatched for beauty![1]
This poem about Yamato, attributed to legendary Prince Yamato Takeru who in
the 4th century CE won a series of great victories against the Emperor's enemies
but died in defeat at the age of thirty, describes the place considered to be
the birthplace of Japanese civilization [2]. The province of
Yamato, where Nara Prefecture is located currently, became the strongest
political entity in Japan during the 4th century and grew steadily in size and
power over the next two centuries [3]. The name Yamato since
that time has referred poetically and nationalistically to all of Japan.
On August 8, 1940, the Imperial Japanese Navy gave the name of Yamato to the
world's largest and most powerful battleship that was being built at Kure Naval
Arsenal in Hiroshima Prefecture. A few days after the outbreak of the Pacific
War, Yamato was commissioned into service on December 16, 1941. The huge
battleship became flagship of the Japanese Combined Fleet the following
February, but Yamato saw very little action during the Pacific War and met her
end when sunk by torpedoes and bombs dropped by American warplanes on April 7,
1945.
The Japanese people knew nothing about battleship Yamato during the war since
her existence and military capabilities were considered top secret [4].
Mitsuru Yoshida, a Yamato junior officer who survived the sinking, completed in
1946 his story of the giant battleship's final mission, but his work was
prohibited from publication by a General Headquarters censor of the Allied
occupation who wrote that it "cannot fail to arouse in the mind of the readers
something like deep regret for the lost great battleship, and who can be sure
that the warlike portion of the Japanese do not yearn after another war in which
they may give another Yamato a better chance? [5]" Yoshida's
memoir, entitled Requiem for Battleship Yamato, was published finally in 1952 at
the end of the Allied occupation, and this triggered great interest by the
Japanese public in the legendary warship that has continued until today. Movies,
books, documentaries, manga comic books, models, a TV animation series, and a
museum reflect the public's fascination with Yamato, which serves as a symbol of
Japanese nationalism although with different meanings and interpretations
depending on personal political and philosophical persuasion. This essay
examines four contradictions that surround battleship Yamato in history and in
Japanese popular perception.
1. Powerful or Weak?
By whatever measurement, Yamato was number one in the world or top class
among warships with total length of 263 meters, maximum width of 36.9 meters,
standard displacement of 65,000 tons, and three turrets with three 46 cm guns
each that could fire a shell weighing 1,460 kilograms a distance of 42
kilometers [6]. However, this seemingly super battleship entered
service during the same month when the Japanese Navy itself demonstrated clear
superiority of aircraft over huge battleships with eight U.S. battleships sunk
or damaged at Pearl Harbor and the British Royal Navy's battleship Prince of
Wales and battlecruiser Repulse sunk off the eastern coast of Malaya. During
meetings to decide whether to go forward with construction of super battleships, Isoroku Yamamoto, head of the Navy's Aeronautics Department in the mid-1930s,
argued strongly but unsuccessfully that attacking power of aircraft would
increase tremendously so that warships could be sunk before they could even fire
their guns at each other [7].
During the Battle of Midway in early June 1942, battleship Yamato remained
300 miles behind the four aircraft carriers that sank from attacks by American
carrier-based aircraft and "achieved nothing but retirement at full speed once
Japanese carrier forces were given a fatal blow. [8]" From
August 1942 to May 1943, Yamato remained safely at Truk anchorage as Navy
leaders were reluctant to commit the ship to battle due to vulnerability to air
attacks. As the Battle of Guadalcanal raged on, crewmen on warships headed to
the frontlines sarcastically referred to the huge battleship at anchorage as
Hotel Yamato with its amenities such as air conditioning, fine food, and
individual beds rather than hammocks for crewmen [9].
Yamato
contributed almost nothing to Japan's war effort, so there was a joke in the
Navy that Yamato along with China's Great Wall and Egypt's pyramids were the
world's three most useless things [10].
Yamato shot her main guns against the enemy for the first time ever during
the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. The Japanese Navy suffered a great
defeat, and Yamato's sister ship Musashi was sunk by numerous torpedoes and
bombs dropped by American warplanes. In April 1945, Yamato led a ten-ship fleet
toward Okinawa and was sunk after being hit by 12 torpedoes and 5 bombs dropped
by American aircraft [11]. Yamato lost 2,740 men, and only 269
men survived [12]. Yamato's sinking was the end of Japan's
surface fleet.
2. Heroic or Tragic?
Histories and fictional works about battleship Yamato focus on the ship's
final suicidal mission. The order from the Commander in Chief at Combined Fleet
headquarters read that the 2nd Fleet of ten ships would be led by Yamato in a
tokkō (special attack) operation against enemy ships around Okinawa, and fuel
would be provided for only one way with no cover by Japanese aircraft. On April
5, 1945, commanding officers of ships in the Second Fleet vehemently objected to
the senseless operation from which the fleet was not expected to return [13].
Vice Admiral Seiichi Itō, Second Fleet Commander, finally ended the objections
with the following words: "I think that we are being given the appropriate
chance to die. A samurai lives so that he is always prepared to die. [14]" Ryūnosuke Kusaka, Chief of Staff of the Combined Fleet, had made clear earlier
to Itō, "You are being requested to die gloriously, heralding the deaths of
100,000,000 Japanese who prefer death to surrender. [15]"
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Otokotachi no
Yamato
(Men's Yamato)
released in 2005
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The three major Japanese popular films about battleship Yamato (Otokotachi no
Yamato (Men's Yamato), 2005; Rengō Kantai (Combined Fleet), 1981;
Senkan Yamato
(Battleship Yamato), 1953, based on Mitsuru Yoshida's memoir published in 1952)
depict how crewmen fought courageously to the death against attacking aircraft.
Each movie shows how the top two officers bravely went down with the sinking
ship as Vice Admiral Ito entered his private room after giving an order to stop
the operation and turn back after rescuing men and Yamato Captain Kosaku Ariga
bound himself by rope to the ship's binnacle. After the ship sank, several men
who got off prior to the sinking were hit by bullets when American warplanes
strafed the water where survivors were floating.
The heroism of the legendary Yamato officers and crewmen exemplifies the
behavior of a type of hero in Japanese tradition who fights courageously but
ends in tragic defeat. Morris explains this kind of hero, "Faced with defeat,
the hero will typically take his own life in order to . . . vindicate his honour,
and make a final assertion of his sincerity. His death is no temporary setback
which will be redeemed by his followers, but represents an irrevocable collapse
of the cause he has championed: in practical terms the struggle has been useless
and, in many instances, counter-productive. [16]" Prince Yamato
Takeru, who fought and lost in the 4th century CE, is the archetype of this type
of hero, and during World War II the kamikaze pilots and the men of Yamato
followed his example as they carried out suicidal tokkō (special attack)
operations [17].
3. Remembered or Imagined?
Japan remembers battleship Yamato and the men who died in typical ways such
as monuments near the former Kure Naval Arsenal where the ship was constructed,
in the former naval cemetery in Kure City, at the tip of southern mainland Japan
in Makurazaki City facing the East China Sea where the ship sank, and on the
island of Tokunoshima near the site of the sinking. Japanese people became
especially interested in the historical Yamato when in 1985 articles and
programs appeared about an underwater exploration team that had discovered the
sunken battleship and photographed the wreck at the bottom of the sea. In 1999,
the same dive team that had explored the wreck of the Titanic investigated the
Yamato remains with two advanced submersibles. Interest in Yamato soared in
April 2005 with the opening of the Yamato Museum in Kure City and in December
2005 with the opening of the film Otokotachi no Yamato (Men's Yamato), the sixth
most popular film of 2006 based on box office receipts [18]. Yamato Museum has
averaged 1 million visitors per year from its opening to March 2013, which puts
it close to the popularity of nearby Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which had
1.4 million visitors in the fiscal year ending March 2013 [19].
Battleship Yamato also lives in the imagination of the Japanese public
through the popular science fiction TV animation series, films, and manga
stories about Uchū Senkan Yamato (Space Battleship Yamato). The original TV
series, which started in 1974, showed the Earth in 2199 under attack by an alien
race called Gamilas who tried to kill humans with radiation poisoning by meteor
bombs. Earth's inhabitants retreated underground to escape radiation and
discovered the sunken battleship Yamato, which they rebuilt into a huge
spaceship that looked similar to the original WWII warship. Mitsuru Yoshida, who
survived Yamato's sinking, wrote in the late 1970s that for many young Japanese
people Yamato is first the name of the cartoon's spaceship with little knowledge
of the real battleship [20]. The live-action film
Uchū Senkan Yamato (Space
Battleship Yamato) opened in December 2010 and became the fourth most popular
film of 2011 [21]. The spaceship Yamato, which represents Japan with the ancient
poetic name for the country and an all Japanese crew, fought heroically to save
Earth against the Gamilas. In the final action scene of the 2010 movie, Yamato's
captain ordered the crew from the ship and made a suicide attack against an
enemy spaceship from planet Gamilas that resulted in the destruction of both
ships.
4. Militaristic or Pacifistic?
Far East Asians outside of Japan consider battleship Yamato as a symbol of
Japan's aggressive militarism during the Pacific War. Even though Yamato had
almost no military success, they regard the giant battleship to be symbolic of
their countries' former enemy, Japan, which committed numerous wartime
atrocities. In contrast, many Japanese people in the postwar period do not
associate Yamato with militarism at all but instead with the ship's courageous
but ultimately calamitous defense of the homeland while the enemy regularly
dropped firebombs on Japan's cities and finally atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Japan and Yamato are portrayed as victims rather than aggressors.
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First feature film of Space
Battleship Yamato (1977)
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The movies Otokotachi no Yamato (Men's Yamato) and Rengō Kantai (Combined
Fleet) both emphasize the mission, although hopeless, to defend family members
and friends from the attacking enemy. Otokotachi no Yamato depicts the enemy's
mercilessness when helpless Yamato crewmen get strafed in the water and when a
surviving Yamato sailor visited a Hiroshima hospital where his girlfriend, who
had been severely wounded by the atomic bomb, soon died. Yamato Museum has
promotion of the importance of peace as one of its basic objectives despite its
main hall with a 1/10-scale model of the warship [22]. The TV series and movie
Uchū
Senkan Yamato (Space Battleship Yamato) transformed the battleship "from the
emblem of prewar Japanese militarism to a global (literally) emissary of peace
and love to the universe. [23]" Yamato bravely defended the entire Earth and only
fought when attacked [24].
Final Thoughts
The contradictions and differing attributes of battleship Yamato allow
Japanese people, no matter where on the political spectrum, to consider the ship
in their own ways as a national symbol. This flexibility as a symbol contributes
to Yamato's continuing popularity in Japan almost 70 years after torpedoes and
bombs from American warplanes sank the ship while on a hopeless mission.
Notes
1. Carter 1991, 19-20.
2. Morris 1975, 2, 9, 13.
3. Meyer 1993, 23-4.
4. Taiheiyō sensō kenkyū kai 2009, 240.
5. Yoshida, Mitsuru 1985, xxix-xxx.
6. Nagasawa 2007, 82-3.
7. Agawa 1979, 90-4.
8. Yokoi 1986, 513.
9. NHK shuzai han 2013, 42-4; Yamato 2007,
89-90.
10. Taiheiyō sensō kenkyū kai 2009, 238.
11. Yoshida and Hara 2005, 260. This
essay's numbers are confirmed torpedo and bomb hits from Yoshida's Senkan
Yamato no saigo (The last of Battleship Yamato). A table provides
different numbers of torpedo and bomb hits from nine other sources.
12. Yoshida, Toshio 1972, 176. Other sources
provide different numbers for the number of men who died in the sinking of
Yamato.
13. Ito 1956, 158-9.
14. Hara 1961, 278.
15. Yoshida, Mitsuru 1985, 38.
16. Morris 1975, xxi-ii.
17. Ibid., 276-334. Yamato's suicide
mission is described on p. 304.
18. Nihon eiga seisakusha renmei 2007.
19. Todaka 2013; Hiroshima City 2013.
20. Yoshida, Mitsuru 1985, xxix.
21. Nihon eiga seisakusha renmei 2012.
22. Yamato Myūjiamu 2014.
23. Napier 2005.
24. Takekawa 2013.
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