No Yamato film outperformed Farewell in 1978, and no Yamato song outperformed the magnificent From Yamato With Love, which became hugely popular and made the pop music charts. Music researcher Toshiako Sato explores the making of the song with observations on the meaning of Yu Aku’s lyrics.
Part 7 in a series of articles about lyricist Yu Aku
by Toshiaki Sato
Published February 16, 2024 in the Adult Popular Songs column on Catalog House. See the original article here.
Farewell to Yamato for the first time in 46 years
January 5, 2024. Farewell to Yamato, produced in 1978, was revived and remastered in 4K digital, and released at cinema complexes in Tokyo. Fans who were in junior high and high school at the time of the film’s original release rushed to the theater. It was our first time in a long while we could revisit our encounter with and farewell to Space Battleship Yamato.
In my case, I first saw Yamato on TV when I was in the 5th grade of elementary school in 1974. Then, in the summer of 1977, I stood in line at Ginza Tokyu on the opening day of the Yamato movie, which had been re-edited into a theater version. Incidentally, the predecessor of Ginza Tokyu was the Ginza Zensensa, which opened before the war in April 1938. Its impressive architecture resembled the spire of a European castle.
On the opening day of Space Battleship Yamato, a long line of people queued up in front of the theater. It was crowded with middle and high school students and college students. This was the beginning of the unprecedented anime boom in the late 1970s.
The following year, a completely new and complete work was produced. Farewell to Yamato was released on August 5, 1978. At that time, Ginza Tokyu was closed due to deterioration. I was 15 years old and stood in line all night long at the Milan Theater in Shinjuku to see the first screening on the opening day. There were so many all-nighters and first-timers that the theater moved the screening up to early in the morning. That level of enthusiasm would be unthinkable nowadays.
The script was written by Keisuke Fujikawa, who also worked on the TV series, and Hideaki Yamamoto, who also wrote for Yamato 2. The director was Toshio Masuda, who had directed Yujiro Ishihara’s films at Nikkatsu. The music was by Hiroshi Miyagawa and the lyrics to the theme song were by Yuu Aku, both from the TV series.
The biggest selling point of the film was “Yamato‘s final moments.” The Gatlantis Empire tries to destroy the Earth with a white comet. To stop them, Susumu Kodai (voice: Kei Tomiyama) becomes the captain of Yamato. He releases the surviving crew members and with the corpse of his girlfriend Yuki Mori (voice: Yoko Asagami) in his arms, he makes a suicide attack on a giant battleship approaching Earth. His self-sacrifice to protect the earth has been criticized as an anachronistic “glorification of kamikaze attacks,” but the film has its own catharsis, and you could hear the sobs of the female fans in the theater.
Illustration by Itomoko
Kenji Sawada X Yu Aku X Katsuo Ohno
In the scene where Yamato makes a desperate suicide attack, the theme song (lyrics by Yu Aku/composition by Hiroshi Miyagawa) is arranged like a funeral dirge. After a flash and explosion, the screen goes completely dark. After that, a beautiful piano intro comes from the screen.
The song is From Yamato With Love (released on August 1, 1978) sung by Kenji Sawada (also known as “Julie.”) The lyrics were written by Yu Aku and the music was by Katsuo Ohno. This trio started with the theme song As Time Passes from the 1975 TBS drama The Devil’s Advocate, directed by Mitsuhiko Kuze.
Their first single was Hateful Bastard (September 5, 1977), followed by Samurai (January 21, 1978). Their fourth consecutive single was Darling (May 21, 1978). The previous year, Kenji Sawada had sung Arbitrarily (May 21, 1977) with this trio, winning the Grand Prizes at the 8th Japan Song Awards and the 19th Japan Record Awards. In the midst of the unprecedented Pink Lady whirlwind, Julie’s rapid advance continued.
Then, producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki, the man behind Space Battleship Yamato, asked Julie to create a song that would be appropriate for Yamato‘s final moments with lyrics by Yu Aku. Initially, Hiroshi Miyagawa composed the music in the Yamato image, but Nishizaki was not satisfied with any of the four versions Miyagawa proposed, so he offered the job to Katsuo Ohno. From Yamato With Love was born out of this competition. Hiroshi Miyagawa ended up creating the arrangement.
When I worked with Hiroshi Miyagawa once on a recording job, I asked him about this. He laughed and said, “Well, you should definitely listen to Katsuo Ohno’s demo tape. It was really good. It was a great success.”
Katsuo Ohno himself provided a comment on the song in the final episode of Yu Aku at Dusk, in which I appeared, on Naippon Broadcasting (March 22, 2016):
“Mr. Miyagawa, the arranger, liked the sound of the piano on the demo tape. He asked me, ‘How do you make it sound like that?’ I answered, ‘I stuck an attachment to a live piano and applied effects.’ In the recording, Mr. Miyagawa did exactly what I described.”
The demo tape miraculously survived and is included on the CD Katsuo Ohno: Phantom Melody (2003). Listening to it, one can hear how much Hiroshi Miyagawa loved Katsuo Ohno’s original and arranged the song based on that. This came to fruition in the final scene.
(Listen to it on Youtube here)
Left: Kenji Sawada’s 24th single From Yamato With Love (Polydor), released on August 1, 1978. Right: the soundtrack
(Nippon Columbia) was released in August 1978. It includes an instrumental version of From Yamato With Love.
Yu Aku’s thoughts, Julie’s voice
Yu Aku’s lyrics are: If the beauty of the one you love is superior to flowers and to stars, you should protect them with open arms. That love is worth throwing away your body for. It states that each one of us should think only of “the one we love.”
The film is all about self-sacrifice, though, and could be taken as a “glorification of kamikaze attacks.” However, Aku Yu’s lyrics are not about self-sacrifice for the nation. They seem to gently tell the protagonist, Susumu Kodai, that he only needs to sacrifice himself for the sake of his loved ones. Moreover, the lyrics seem to reverse the meaning of “farewell” in the title of the film. Aku wants the audience not to say “farewell” at this time, showing his resistance to the “kamikaze” propaganda. Not for the greater good, but for the sake of individualism.
From Yamato With Love was completed by the beautiful voice of Kenji Sawada, the melody of Katsuo Ohno, and the arrangement by Hiroshi Miyagawa. It had such an impact that it changed the theme, direction, and impression of the film itself. This was due to the power of Yu Aku’s lyrics and Kenji Sawada’s overwhelming expressive power.
Although it was a theme song for anime, it quickly charted as a single by Kenji Sawada. It hit No. 4 on the hit chart, and peaked at No. 2 on the TBS “Best Ten” chart, becoming a further impetus for Kenji Sawada’s rapid progress that year.
A “stage mix” of the song can be found on Kenji Sawada’s album And Now for the Glorious Banquet (Polydor, August 1978).
Katsuo Ohno’s original demo tape can be found on Phantom Melodiy Vol. 1 (Grace Records, December 2003).
Toshiaki Sato
Entertainment film researcher and producer of adult songs
Born in Tokyo in 1963. He is a columnist of songs and entertainment movies that colored the Showa era. He is an entertainment evangelist and producer of columns, radio, music and video software. He also produced My Last Song Anthology, a CD by Kyoko Koizumi and Mariko Hamada, and composed the stage play My Last Song: Songs Left Behind by Kuze-san. He is the author of Crazy Music Compendium (Shinko Music) and many other books. He received the Bunka Hoso Special Award in 2015. Artistic Director of the 8th Ryogoku Art Festival.