The battleship — commissioned 8 days after Pearl Harbour and sunk — embodies a painful duality that persists six decades after the nation’s defeat.
TOKYO: A symbol of honour and bravery in the service of a lost cause, or the epitome of meaningless sacrifice. Japan’s giant battleship Yamato — commissioned eight days after Pearl Harbour and sunk on a suicidal mission in the final months of World War Two — embodies a painful duality that persists six decades after the nation’s defeat.
Now the tale of the Yamato, the biggest battleship ever built and the pride of the Imperial Japanese Navy, is being retold in a film, Yamato: The Last Battle, to be released later this month. Made with help from Japan’s armed forces and using a replica two-thirds the size of the 263-metre-long battleship, Toei Co.’s Yamato is the latest in a string of military movies in a land whose postwar pacifism is colliding with a new nationalism.
The release also coincides with a chill in Japan’s ties with China and South Korea, where bitter memories of Tokyo’s past aggression have been inflamed by Prime Minister Koizumi’s repeated visits to a shrine that honours convicted war criminals along with the country’s 2.5 million war dead.
The makers of Yamato bristle at any suggestion the film is intended to glorify war or militarism. “My message is about people’s courage to live, and I want to have people think again how to live with self-awareness and pride as Japanese,” producer Haruki Kadokawa said. . “We don’t label our film an anti-war film. We are depicting the events of 60 years ago to get across the idea that we never want to go to war again.”
But some say viewers could take away a different lesson. Sven Saaler, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo explains, “The basic message is that it’s worthwhile to sacrifice your life for your country.”
The 64,000-ton Yamato, whose name refers both to the country of Japan and to its traditional culture, has long held a special place in the Japanese postwar psyche. Young boys still put together plastic models of the ship, in its day a technological marvel with awesome firepower that many believed was invincible.
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