Tea Room Invitation
Space Battleship Yamato, a Story of Love and “Mecha”
About the second TV series
Hundreds of light years in an instant
“Warp” is now a common word
The anime movie Farewell to Yamato, which caused a sensation this summer, will be revived as Space Battleship Yamato 2 on Yomiuri TV and Nippon TV from October 14. The theme and main plot will remain the same, but the human drama, action, and mecha will be re-drawn in detail.
A space anime that sweetly croons “Would you die for the one you love?” A boy who loves mecha, a female student who cries for romance, a middle-aged man who thinks about Yamato, a bittersweet symbol of the glory and downfall of the Japanese people. There are various ways of perceiving it, but the navigation method of “human” and “mecha” in Yamato is presented here as part of the “Tea Room Invitation” program.
Among children, “warp” is now a common word.
“I warped out of school today to play baseball, and my mom got mad at me.”
You might ask your child, who didn’t come home and skipped piano lessons, “Warp? Isn’t that another word for escape?” No matter what you say, you can’t get them to explain it.
Warp navigation is a method of breaking through the light speed barrier to travel hundreds of light years in an instant. Of course, this is impossible according to modern physics theory. According to Aritsune Toyota, who collaborated on the science-fiction concepts for Space Battleship Yamato, “When Einstein decided that objects can’t travel faster than light,” he says, “troubled science fiction writers came up with a method.” What is it?
There were two problems with Yamato‘s navigation. The first was to reach Iscandar (a fictional planet) to retrieve a device that would remove the radioactivity that was contaminating the Earth. The other was the one-year time limit for the round trip.
Jumping with “Warp”
A Five-dimensional world
In the world of science-fiction, the theory of relativistic space navigation based on Einstein’s special theory of relativity is often used. The theory states that at the speed of light, time stops and the human lifespan increases. However, even if the space soldiers could make the round trip, nearly 300,000 years would have elapsed on Earth, and Susumu Kodai and his team would have become Urashima Taro. This is where “warp” comes in.
The word “warp” literally means “to distort.” The logic behind warp navigation is, navigating three-dimensional space without passing through the axis of time. To be precise, it is a four-dimensional space-time continuum (three dimensions in space and one in time). Human beings are folded into the world of a fifth dimension and travel hundreds or thousands of light years in an instant.
In a nutshell, it’s like a fish that usually swims along the surface of the water. But it distorts that surface to create a large wave, and then leaps through space from the crest of that wave to the top of another large wave. When warping, both Yamato and its crew blur like a mirage. There is a shock when crossing dimensions, and no matter how many times you experience it, you will never get used to it. The physical limit is three times a day, but Yamato does it four times.
By the way, in the American SF world, in addition to “warp,” there is also “big jump” and “leap.” This method of navigation has been in use for quite some time. Mr. Toyota also wrote about “hyper-leap navigation” in The Stigma of the Earth, which he wrote in 1965.
Mecha size comparison chart
The death of a tearful lover
The ending may be different, but it is still very human
The Novel is also a Bestseller
The popularity of Space Battleship Yamato is also reflected in the sales of novels aimed at junior high and high school students. For example, Farewell to Yamato, published by Shueisha’s Cobalt Library, is already in its fourth edition after only a month and a half on the market, selling over 300,000 copies. It is based on a script and was turned into a novel within a month or so. It is also very modern. 70% of the books are bought by people who have seen the movie, and the ratio of male to female readers is 7 to 3, which means that the book is also popular among girls.
This Yamato is converted from the World War II battleship lying at the bottom of the sea. When caught in a desperate pinch, the ghost of the former captain, Okita, is seen by the young captain, Susumu Kodai, and tells him, “It is your life. You still have life left in you. Yamato‘s life has not run out yet.”
The result is that Yamato‘s men are forced to leave the ship, and Kodai rams into the enemy’s huge battleship. To war-oriented people, it looked like, “Huh? What?” When I asked a junior high school girl at the movie theater, whose eyes were still red from crying, she replied, “Isn’t it inspiring to be able to put your life on the line for what you believe is right?” Again, I was surprised.
But the reason the girls began to sob all at once was at the very end; Kodai sat his girlfriend, Yuki, who had died in the war, next to the captain’s seat and said to her, “I’m sorry for all the pain I’ve caused you. From now on, we will be together forever.” It is not a story based on logic, but is moving nonetheless.
“That’s right. The battle scenes are borrowed, so to speak, from the ‘extreme situation’ setting. What I want to talk about most is the teenage years. Challenging one’s own potential, and love. What is it?”
Executive Producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki emphasizes “love” here. The first series of Yamato is a record of the growth and courage of a young man named Susumu Kodai. In Farewell, the author expanded it once more.
“It isn’t just about winning for Earth,” Mr. Nishizaki says, “but for what I call ‘space love.’ I have no intention of dividing love into a major or minor cause. What I want to emphasize is the importance of ‘love for what is close to us’.”
One of the characteristics of Yamato is that it depicts its enemies not as giant robots or yokai (monsters), but as human beings. The staff also believes, “that’s why we can’t depict them like a haunting.”
Unlike in the case of ambiguous images, where the target audience is around 15 years old, the TV series focuses on 12-year olds. Moto Fukuo, a producer at Yomiuri TV who has a daughter that age, smiles wryly when he says, “It’s a difficult age when self-consciousness begins to emerge strongly. We’re careful about that and portray the characters in a more human way. I don’t want to stir up fanaticism.”
The ending of the new TV series is still a secret, but it will end differently from Yamato‘s suicide attack in the movie.
Mitsuru Yoshida, now an auditor at the Bank of Japan, is a former crew member who wrote The Last Days of the Battleship Yamato. There were some similarities between the image of Space Battleship Yamato and the original Yamato, such as the scene in which the crew members are ordered to leave the ship,
Overall, the story is a world away from that of those who died on the original Yamato. I think the movie is fine, but apart from its coolness, when we think about the war, we also need to consider its tragedy and the problems that lie beyond it. That is also the deepest form of love.
(Azuma)