Looking back on the past year
● The Yamato boom sweeps the nation
On August 4th (1978) at 8pm, Fuji TV aired the Space Battleship Yamato movie version for the first time as a three-hour program. It was simply a TV anime re-edited for the theater, which returned to TV. Since the first TV broadcast was on Nippon TV, there was a battle between NTV and Fuji to acquire the broadcast rights, and one theory is that Fuji TV prevailed with an offer of 25 million yen.
As expected, the Yamato boom was reflected in the ratings, which were 31.2% in the Kansai region, 27.5% in Nagoya, and 26.2% in Kansai (according to video research). In addition, they introduced and promoted the highlights of the second movie, which was released the following day on the 5th.
The second movie, Farewell to Yamato, recreated the same excitement as Saturday Night Fever, starring John Travolta, the year before. It was released simultaneously at 132 theaters nationwide, but young people, mostly junior and senior high school students, lined up as early as July 29th at the Umeda Tsukabi Movie Palace in northern Osaka. Since they were mostly underage, they were persuaded to leave.
However, on the day before the opening, 400 people lined up, including 100 high school girls. The theater was forced to accommodate them inside and they stayed there overnight. Since 1,500 young people had gathered by 4 a.m. on the 5th, the theater decided to open the Umeda Tsukabi and temporarily open Tsukiei Hall in the same building and show the film on three screens.
The screening started two hours early at 6:30 a.m. All three screening rooms were full with 2,200 spectators at the time they opened. The screening times were staggered at each theater, and the film reels were passed to each in tandem. The same was true for the premiere theaters in Kyoto and Kobe, where the screening time was also moved up.
In Tokyo, a line had formed at Shibuya Tokyu Rex since the evening of the 4th, and by the early morning of the 5th, the number had grown to 1,500. The sister theaters Pantheon and Tokyu Meigaza were quickly prepared as pinch-hitters, but the line of fans just kept growing. The Pantheon started screening at 4:30 a.m., Rex at 5:30 a.m., and Meigaza at 6 a.m. to handle the audience, and each theater moved up its screening time to accommodate them.
The reason for the lines forming on the first day was probably because the theaters offered original cels to the first 100 people. Taking advantage of Yamato‘s popularity, the panic movie The Swarm, which depicts a killer bee invasion, was a brisk seller on opening day in Osaka, and theater officials joked that it was “adding insult to injury.”
In the end, it was said that 200,000 advance tickets with posters were sold at the theater box office alone, and if consignment sales were included, the total exceeded 500,000.
The second Yamato film, produced by the long-established Toei Animation, was well-made, not a rehash of the previous TV version. The battle scenes are inferior to Star Wars, but there are plenty of them, and the mecha design is also elaborate. Yuki Mori’s costume design was specially entrusted to popular fashion designer Yukiko Hanai, and the theme song was sung by Kenji Sawada, which was a great service.
As someone who grew up during the latter half of the war, when I finished watching the movie, I was reminded of the phrase “Shoot and don’t stop” that I heard so many times during the war. This movie is truly permeated with the bamboo coffin spirit. The hero, Susumu Kodai, is the very image of a lone kamikaze pilot. The only saving grace is that he sacrificed himself to save his comrades…
● Numerous “special features” in the media
Yamato‘s explosive hit has made producer Nishizaki Yoshinobu the “person of the moment.” First, on August 28, the staid Asahi Shimbun featured him in its People column. The article was a whopping six-column box (usually four columns), which surprised me with its extraordinary treatment. The interviewer was editorial committee member Hiroshi Iwata.
Nishizaki’s biggest message on the film was, “I didn’t want it to be just a sci-fi action film. I wanted to include human drama that is relevant to the present day. In the first film, I portrayed the life of a man who achieves his goal. That is, a man who believes in his potential and works hard until the very end. In the second film, I intended to portray through the young protagonist that if there is ever a time when a human being risks their life, it is for the love of others.”
The popularity of Yamato was also featured in the Yomiuri Short Review column in the Yomiuri evening edition dated the 23rd, and Nishizaki also appeared in the Human Appearance column in the same paper’s morning edition dated September 12th.
However, the most interesting article about Yamato was a feature article in the September 5th issue of the Mainichi Shimbun, a popular topic in the newspaper’s Reporter’s Eyes column. It was a large article; 10 columns, 256 lines, with 15 characters per column. It is probably unprecedented for such a large space to be devoted to an anime movie review.
The article was written by Hirofumi Shiraishi, an editorial specialist at the Osaka headquarters. He clearly explains the popularity of Yamato, stating that there are three reasons for its popularity: 1) the main ship, which does not have the coldness of mecha, 2) the Japanese world of obligation and human feelings, and 3) the courage to die for those you love. He also claims that the secret to its popularity can be summed up in one word: “nationalism.”
Not only newspapers, but even the November issue of the monthly general magazine Bungei Shunju featured Yamato. A memoir by Mitsuru Yoshida, a real Yamato crew member, was titled The Generation of Space Battleship Yamato, What a former crew member of Battleship Yamato felt after watching the popular anime.
Even the Asahi Journal (October 27th issue), which seems to have no connection to anime, ran two feature articles: Children who cried over Space Battleship Yamato, and Exploring the Yamato phenomenon as a teen culture. This shows how much of a topic Yamato has become in modern society.
And it even made an appearance in a haiku. I was casually looking at the August 27th edition of the Sports Nippon newspaper (Osaka) when I came across “Ko no yume wa/senkan Yamato/no jo gokochi” [A child’s dream is to ride the battleship Yamato] (by Ryoshi Fukunishi, Sakai City) in the special selection section. The judge, Isamu Isono, commented, “With the SF boom, the anime movie Battleship Yamato is explosively popular. Boys and girls pretend to be their beloved warriors, a well-written haiku.” This was probably the first time an anime was used as a subject for haiku.
Yamato ended up having a long run of ten weeks until October 13th. In the ninth week, it grossed 3 billion yen and exceeded 1.8 billion yen in distribution revenue. By the way, the first movie made 2 billion yen in box office revenue and 930 million yen in distribution revenue. Contracts for export were concluded with 11 countries, including the US, UK, Italy, Mexico, and Spain. It was shown in 5 countries and earned 20 million yen. Record sales were 1.6 billion yen for 80,000 LPs.
There were 1.2 million copies novels and manga sold, earning 720 million yen. There are figures that say that sales of related character goods, such as watches and pendants, earned 200 million yen. The first film made 900 million yen, so in less than two months the second film has made more than double. The only recent Japanese films to have made over 2 billion yen at the box office are Toho’s Mt. Hakkouda, Kadokawa’s Proof of Man, and Shochiku’s The Village of the Eight Graves. There is no doubt that Yamato will be in the top 4.