This collection of music-based conversations includes a look back at Yamato music history with Akira Miyagawa from Showa 40 Man magazine (February 2023), and the feelings of talented musicians who performed with him in twin concerts, interviewed in Sarasate magazine (May 2023).
In 2013, a train station in the city of Kure, where the Battleship Yamato was built, adopted the Space Battleship Yamato theme as its jingle to announce arriving trains. A reporter for the AERAdot website investigated how this was decided, giving us a look into local and musical history.
Isao Sasaki’s voice was the first anyone ever heard when they met Space Battleship Yamato, and he still belts out that theme song as no one else can. Two days before his first-ever livestream concert, a pair of interviews with Sasaki appeared online, and as usual he had plenty of stories to tell.
Regular followers of the Cosmo DNA Facebook page are familiar with “Yamatunes for Tuesday,” a weekly drop of amazing online music discoveries. The reach of Yamato music is far and wide with incredible energy and variety, guaranteed to lift your spirits. In this second collection of online Yamatunes, the fans step up and deliver.
Regular followers of the Cosmo DNA Facebook page are familiar with “Yamatunes for Tuesday,” a weekly drop of amazing online music discoveries. The reach of Yamato music is far and wide with incredible energy and variety, guaranteed to lift your spirits. Here’s an extensive roundup of Yamatunes for easy access whenever you need it.
To commemorate a newly-recorded re-release of Kentaro Haneda’s Yamato Grand Symphony, the Japanese website Real Sound interviewed Conductor Naoto Otomo, who was intimately involved in its production since it was composed in 1984. Here he describes the conditions for its creation and its evolution since then.
In terms of Yamato music collecting, this was the single biggest release of 2015, a triple-disc treasure trove that followed in the wake of the 30-CD Sound Almanac series. It may be hard to imagine that anything had been left out, but the well goes deeper than everyone thought, including those who worked on it.
Starting in July 2012, Columbia Japan provided a great gift to fans both new and old with this newly-remastered and upgraded reissue of the Yamato music catalog. Here we examine the second half of this monumental series with extensive liner notes, historical trivia, track listings, and more.
In 1999, a book was published titled the Space Battleship Yamato Legacy. It covered Series 1, ending with an insightful interview with the one and only singer Mr. Isao Sasaki. In it, the legendary “Voice of Yamato” shared his privileged viewpoint of the experience.
A complete record of Yamato music releases starting in 1984. Once the saga migrated from LP to CD, fans were finally treated to content that had been locked up in vaults from the earliest days and much more besides. [3 pages]
As soon as the Yamato movie became a certified hit in 1977, the race was on for anyone with musical talent to ride the wave by publishing their own version of the opening and closing songs. Presented here is a diverse gallery of albums containing covers of the Yamato Theme and/or The Scarlet Scarf.
For the sake of collectors everywhere, here is a concise index of all Yamato music releases, up to and including the Sound Almanac series in 2014. Each entry contains a link to further information about each one.
Despite the countless hours of recordings that was commercially released during the production years, a large body of background music was left out. In September 2000, this oversight was finally corrected by Columbia Records with the debut of the Space Battleship Yamato “Eternal Edition” CDs. Read an overview here.
In November 2004, Nippon Columbia music publishing rolled out a 30th anniversary “Eternal Edition Premium” CD collection. Unlike the earlier series, this new one pulled all the symphonic albums together into one package, plus a few extras. Read an overview here.
One of the joys of collecting the music is that each successive reissue of the catalog over the decades has placed more of it into the hands of eager fans. That long process finally culminated with Nippon Columbia’s Yamato Sound Almanac. Here is a rundown of the first half of this milestone in Yamato music history.
In 1983, the saga arrived on home video at exactly the same time its finale was running in theatres. In the time since then, Yamato has been released many times over in practically every format. A review of its complete video history gives us an ideal scope through which we can view the evolution of an entire medium.
Yamato played as big a role in the home video revolution as it did in the anime revolution, showing what was possible and sparking an enormous appetite for more. And as soon as Yoshinobu Nishizaki finished making Yamato movies in 1983, he shifted gears and got started on Yamato videos. Here are the results…
by Tim Eldred
Although the idea for a Yamato documentary came to me just about a year ago, it has been many years in the making. Now that the work’s behind me, I thought I’d take this moment to share with you what made it happen.
