Posted on 11/27/2005 4:41:55 PM PST by blam
Battleship film revives Japan's pride in wartime generation
(Filed: 28/11/2005)
Sixty years after the colossal battleship Yamato was sunk, the pride of Japan's wartime navy is once again an object of fascination.
Almost 400,000 visitors have flocked to see a full-scale replica of the deck of the Yamato in Onomichi, western Japan. The ship was reconstructed for the shooting of a film, Men of the Yamato, which will be released next month.
The £3million replica deck, made for the film Men of the Yamato, has attracted 400,000 Japanese visitors
The Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, was considered indestructible by the Japanese. But little more than three years after it was completed it was sunk in the East China Sea in April 1945 on a suicidal mission that cost the lives of almost its entire crew of 3,000 men.
The film does not glorify the sacrifice, graphically portraying the anguish of the crew's families and the bloody end to which the men came as their ship was swarmed by US Navy planes.
But, like other recent Japanese war movies, it glosses over Tokyo's aggression and focuses instead on the bravery and comradeship of the men who fought.
Growing tension in East Asia, particularly since North Korea launched a missile over Japanese airspace in 1998, has led to a rethink of the post-war commitment to pacifism. As Japan's Self Defence Forces have been despatched to provide logistical support for the US-led war in Afghanistan and to Iraq for post-war reconstruction, it has become more acceptable to be interested in military matters.
The true hero of the film is the Yamato itself. The production company Toei spent £3 million building the replica deck to ensure the film gives a powerful sense of the scale of the ship and the awe it inspired in the wartime nation.
The ship displaced 65,000 tons and was 862 feet long but was largely obsolete by the time it was built. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour amply demonstrated the vulnerability of battleships to aerial attack.
The anniversary of the ship's sinking was also marked in April by the opening of a museum dedicated to the Yamato in Kure, near Hiroshima, where the original was built. The museum displays items recovered from the Yamato after it was located on the sea bed in 1985.
Under pressure to take a larger share of the burden of fighting in 1945, the Japanese navy elected to turn the Yamato into a gigantic kamikaze ship. With neither air cover nor enough fuel to return, the Yamato was ordered to sail to Okinawa, where the Americans were fighting their way on to Japanese soil.
It was destroyed the day after setting sail, becoming the epitome of the "smashed jewel", a rallying cry for the entire nation to achieve beauty in defeat by dying without surrendering.
The Yamato continues to loom large in popular consciousness. One of the country's most famous cartoon series is Spaceship Yamato, set in a future when the Yamato is recovered from the sea and flown into space. Yamato model ships are the must-have toy for boys.
The Yamato offers the Japanese a relatively safe outlet for feelings of pride in - and sympathy for - the war generation. Few express admiration for the wartime leaders or for soldiers who fought in China, for example, where massacres were committed.
But the navy's reputation was not sullied by atrocities while its leader, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, opposed the catastrophic war with the United States.
The young sailors of the Yamato are widely seen as victims, who fought bravely to protect their country even as they were betrayed.
The film's director, Junya Sato, has stressed it is an anti-war film. "We need to think about what needs to be done so that Japan doesn't go to war again. Making a film about the Yamato is a step in that direction," he said.
However, others fear a negative reaction from a war movie which focuses only on Japanese suffering.
"Given the strained relations with China I wonder whether this is a good time to make this movie. It could be misunderstood as glorifying the ship and the war," said one visitor to the reconstructed Yamato.
Star Blazers ROCKED.
Yes, I think it was the very early 60's. I would have been 12 in 1960. Agreed that the Iowa class were much prettier. And faster, according to what I've read today.
I just finished reading "Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors". What a great book!
Excellent point about the impact those ships could have had off Guadalcanal. They could have engaged in shore bombardment and REALLY plastered Henderson field, but then again Henderson was shelled repeatedly by Kongo class BB's and still kept in the fight.
No tellin', but I'm glad those ships stayed in home waters.
But the IJN couldn't know that until it was too late.
Planning for the Yamato class battleships began as far back as the 1920's - even though they knew it would bust the limits imposed on Japan by the Washington Naval Treaty. Yamato and Musashi were both laid down well before Pearl Harbor. Yamato, in fact, was offficially commissioned just a couple weeks after Pearl.
At the time they were laid down, they seemed to make sense as the solution to the problem of Japanese naval inferiority: They could not build as many ships as Britain or America. But they could build them bigger, and make up in quality what they lacked in quantity. And in the 1930's, advocates for naval air power hadn't won the argument in any naval service of note. Yet.
After Taranto, Pearl Harbor and the sinking of the Repulse and Prince of Wales, it had become obvious to many in the IJN that carriers, not battleships were the way to go - and after Midway, the need became urgent. Yamato and Musashi were already built, so nothing could be done about that. But Shinano was still early enough along that it could be converted to a carrier.
Even so I grant that IJN thinking on naval airpower, ironically (in view of their enormous success with carrier power in the first six months of WWII), was still a little behind the US Navy, which made virtue of necessity after losing all its battlewagons. But if Japan gets nicked for finishing off its obsolete superbattleships, you have to also wonder why the US Navy insisted on building so many new battleships of the South Dakota and Iowa classes - rather than more carriers.
Of course, we DID have the industrial capacity and to spare such that it probably didn't make much difference...
Ditto. USS Jallao, SS-368
The US had over 100 carriers in the Pacific at the end of WW2, albeit, most were the 'baby' or escort carrier class.
I thought the Yamato was destroyed by a warp core breach when a computer defect shut down the containment fields?
Oh. Wrong Yamato.
It almost looks like a small nuke wnt off, great picture.
***Do not forget to give some credit to the suicidally brave task force of destroyer escorts and escort carriers that put up so much of a fight***
TAFFY3 Destroyers were identified as Cruisers when they were first seen, which led to a lot of confusion for the Japanese. Again, the lack of Air Intelligence hurt the Japanese just when they needed it most.
Halsey was "Carrier Nuts" and the Japanese plan to draw the heavy units North had worked PERFECTLY. It was only Toyoda's timidity (uncharacteristicly for him) that saved the day for the Americans...
I think an Iowa class would do fine in a battle with a Yamato class. Yamato was just heavier not better.
Unlikely. Keep in mind that the Japanese Army and the IJN were two very different organizations. The Navy opposed the war, while the Army was having a horrific good old time of it in Manchuko at the time. The IJN was a much more professional organization.
The fast battleships of the Iowa Class offered large AA platforms that could keep up with and protect our carriers. Plus they and their older cousins provided fire support for the many beachheads we stormed against the Japanese and the future North Koreans and Iraqis.
True, the IJN building of super battleships like the Yamato were correct in their 1920ish treaty eyes until events showed them how the carrier was the wave of the future. However, it was the lack of well trained pilots that doomed Japan rather than lack of planes or carriers... Or more super battleships.
Remember, it was Admiral Ozawa's near pilot-less carriers that were the decoys to pull Halsey and his Third Fleet away from San Bernardino and guarding the Leyte Gulf beachhead that allowed the Yamato lead force to come into the gulf to attack...
BTW we Armchair Admirals could win any war given enough beer, chips, dip and cigarettes, eh?
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