Novels, movies, anime… How has Yamato been portrayed after the war?
Why does the battleship Yamato still attract so many people even now, 80 years after the war? The novel The Last Battleship Yamato, the movie Battleship Yamato, the anime Space Battleship Yamato…the changes in how it has been portrayed after the war also reveal fluctuations in the hearts of Japanese people.
from Historical Road magazine, April 2025 issue
by Mizushima Yoshitaka, Modern history researcher
PROFILE
Born in Kanagawa Prefecture in 1969. Graduated from the Faculty of Sociology at Rikkyo University. After working for a publishing company and the editorial production company Monjusha, he is currently writing mainly about modern history. His books include Showa History: The Pacific War in Photographs, Illustrated Guide to the Battlefields of the Manchurian Empire, and A Firm Theory: A 100-Year History of Modern Japan.
People gathered in front of a model of Yamato, used in the film
Battleship Yamato in 1953 (Photo: Mainichi Shimbun/Cynet Photo)
A gigantic battleship built in strict secrecy
In a magazine interview during his time as chairman of the LDP Policy Research Council, current Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who also served as Director-General of the Defense Agency, expressed his opinion on the significance of the battleship Yamato as follows: “Even when it was being built, I think it would have been right to make the fact known that construction was underway on a huge battleship like Yamato, both at home and abroad, and to use it as a force to avoid or deter war. However, there was no intention to use it as a war deterrent. When they were building it, they pretended to build many small ships so that foreign countries wouldn’t know about it, and they even deceived the Japanese government. It’s a completely opposite idea. And in the end, they used it foolishly as a suicide attack and it was sunk.”
(From the book Battleship Yamato Film Encyclopedia)
As Prime Minister Ishiba said, Yamato was built in secret during the war, sent on a suicide mission to Okinawa without the public knowing about it, and sank off the coast of Cape Bono. Why did Yamato, which was kept secret until the end of the war, become an object of attraction to many Japanese people after the war, and why is it still popular today?
“Awakening from defeat”
The meaning of kamikaze attacks
Despite being built with the combined technology of the Imperial Navy, Yamato was sunk in a kamikaze attack without achieving any significant results, and was often treated as a “useless relic” shortly after the war.
Yamato was harshly criticized in the November 1956 issue of the Navy magazine Regret and Sky, which was published before the war, saying, “It may have been better to have buried it in the dark rather than to have over-advertised it and then lost it carelessly, so that it would not have become a laughing stock of the world.”
A major factor in changing these negative evaluations was the novel Requiem for Battleship Yamato. It was written by Mitsuru Yoshida, who barely survived the Okinawa suicide mission on the battleship Yamato, and was published by Sogensha in 1952.
In this novel, there is a famous scene in which a former university student and reserve officer who protests the Okinawa special attack says, “I don’t understand the meaning of dying.” Captain Iwata Usubuchi convinces him by answering, “Japan will have no choice but to wake up after defeat, and we will be the pioneers.” In fact, many doubts have been raised as to whether such a statement was made on the eve of the decisive battle, in anticipation of defeat.
Nevertheless, the idea of “awakening after defeat” gave meaning to those who died in the special attack, and by extension, gave the survivors who felt inferior to their dead comrades a “meaning of life” in advancing the new Japan (awakened after defeat).
L to R: Battleship Yamato Film Encyclopedia (Yosensha, 2010), Mitsuru’s novel, Battleship Yamato movie (Toho, 1953)
The following year, in 1953, the film Battleship Yamato was released based on the novel. In the final scene, the protagonist pleads with the soldiers as they sink to sleep with the Yamato, saying to themselves, “Stand strong, live, survive.”
In this way, Yamato is given a meaning as a comfort to those living in the postwar period, and is reborn.
See the 1953 film subtitled on Youtube here
Yamato as a boy’s dream
In 1959, Weekly Shonen Magazine and Weekly Shonen Sunday were launched. Battleships and fighter planes graced the covers of the boys’ magazines, and the opening feature photo spreads featured detailed illustrations of Yamato and the Zero Fighter, with actual battle scenes. It was the powerful paintings by Shigeru Komatsuzaki and his student Yoshiyuki Takani that captured the hearts of children.
Riding on the war craze among children, plastic models also appeared. In 1960, Nichimo (Nippon Model) released a 1/750 scale model of the battleship Yamato for 300 yen, which became a big hit.
In the aforementioned interview, Prime Minister Ishiba, born in 1957, recounted an episode from when he was in the sixth grade of elementary school, when Nichimo released a 1/200 scale model of the Yamato for 7,500 yen. His parents told him, “If you get into junior high school at the top of your class, we’ll buy it for you,” and he studied enthusiastically (Incidentally, he came fourth in his class, but his parents bought him the model after seeing how determined he was to run away from home).
Toshiya Ichinose, a researcher of comparative social culture, analyzes the Yamato of the 1960s, the period of high economic growth, as follows:
The story was told to many children that it was only thanks to the technology used to build Yamato that it was possible to make bullet trains, giant tankers, high-performance cameras, and so on, and Yamato came to be seen as the pride of Japan, a nation built on technology (Lectures on the Battleship Yamato).
The first oil shock in 1973 brought an end to the high-growth period of the Japanese economy, but the TV broadcast of Space Battleship Yamato began the following year in 1974. The story is about the battleship Yamato, which sank off the coast of Cape Bono, being converted into a space battleship and sent to the planet Iscandar to retrieve a radiation removal device in order to save the Earth, which has been invaded and polluted by the Gamilas Empire.
At the Osaka Expo held in 1970, an announcement was made saying, “The electricity for this venue is supplied by atomic power from the Kansai Electric Power Mihama Power Plant,” and at that time, the “peaceful use of atomic energy” was touted as a matter of course. However, with the end of the high economic growth period, many pollution problems became social issues, and atomic energy came to be treated as a symbol of pollution.
In 1973, The Great Prophecy of Nostradamus became a bestseller, and apocalyptic theories began to spread throughout the world. In that era, Aritsune Toyota, who was in charge of the original concept for Space Battleship Yamato, came up with the idea of global radioactive contamination.
The general outline of the story, “Go to a distant land to retrieve something important, and everyone will be saved by doing so,” is said to be a reference to Journey to the West.
It was manga artist Leiji Matsumoto, who would later serve as director, who suggested using a modified version of the battleship Yamato as the spaceship that would travel to the destination. Matsumoto’s father was a major and a fighter pilot. He was deployed to the Philippines and returned safely, but he lost many of his subordinates, which he continued to grieve for the rest of his life.
“People are not born to die. They are born to live,” his father repeatedly told him. With this in mind, Matsumoto chose the motif of Yamato, which was lost in a suicide attack at sea, but was particular about depicting a ship that returned alive. The captain of the ship, Juzo Okita, is modeled after Matsumoto’s father.
Among the Japanese of the generation who knew the war, there were quite a few who, while enjoying the prosperous Western-style economy and society after the war, felt that “there must have been another path.” Space Battleship Yamato received overwhelming support from such people in their 40s and above at the time.
Yamato in multimedia
Space Battleship Yamato was later made into a series of movies and TV anime. The second movie, Farewell to Yamato, released in 1978, earned 2.1 billion yen in distribution revenue, the second highest for a Japanese movie that year.
The Yamato-related live-action movies Combined Fleet (1981) and Men of Yamato (2005) were the top-grossing Japanese movies of their years. In August 1990, 45 years after the end of the war, Fuji TV aired Battleship Yamato and TBS aired The Sea of Love and Sorrow: The Tragedy of Battleship Yamato.
Yamato has also appeared many times in fictional war stories. There are countless examples, such as Yoshiaki Hiyama’s novel America’s Final Battle: The Battleship Yamato Sinks the American Fleet! published in 1982, and Kaiji Kawaguchi’s manga Silent Service, which began serialization in Morning magazine in 1988.
L to R: Combined Fleet, Men of Yamato, America’s Final Battle
In the imagination, there are stories of Yamato sometimes using modern technology in a time slip to defeat America.
Yamato thus strikes a chord with Japanese people of all generations, but what’s new about the 2019 film version of The Great War of Archimedes (adapted from a manga serialized from 2015 to 2023), is that it uses the oft-quoted theory of “awakening from defeat” not from a kamikaze pilot, but from a battleship designer before the construction of Yamato.
“Whether we build this ship or not, this country will inevitably head toward war. The Japanese are a race that does not know how to lose. No matter how tragic the situation, they will fight to the last man. If that happens, this country will surely perish. But what if, at that time, there is a huge battleship that could become a symbol of the nation of Japan? When it is sunk, wouldn’t that sense of despair awaken this country?”
The logic is that a huge, magnificent battleship is necessary to end the war. In reality, the sinking of Yamato did not end the war, but Archimedes can be said to be an “anti-war film” that questions the very meaning of Yamato‘s existence, taking into account such historical facts.
In this way, the battleship Yamato continues to live in the hearts of Japanese people 80 years after its sinking, sometimes as a source of hope for those who survived, and sometimes as inspiration for children.
Yamato, which was sunk during the Okinawa special attack operation, embodied the hope and pride of those who survived, overturning the guilt they felt, which is why it strikes such a chord with the Japanese people.
