page_title: Japanese battleship Yamato
section_title: Cultural significance
hierarchical_section_title: Japanese battleship Yamato / Cultural significance
caption_attribution_description: English: Battleship Yamato 1:10 Scale Model
context_page_description: Yamato was the lead ship of her class of battleships built for the Imperial Japanese Navy shortly before World War II. She and her sister ship, Musashi, were the heaviest and most powerfully armed battleships ever constructed, displacing 72,800 tonnes at full load and armed with nine 46 cm Type 94 main guns, which were the largest guns ever mounted on a warship.
  Named after the ancient Japanese Yamato Province, Yamato was designed to counter the numerically superior battleship fleet of the United States, Japan's main rival in the Pacific. She was laid down in 1937 and formally commissioned a week after the Pearl Harbor attack in late 1941. Throughout 1942, she served as the flagship of the Combined Fleet, and in June 1942 Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto directed the fleet from her bridge during the Battle of Midway, a disastrous defeat for Japan. Musashi took over as the Combined Fleet flagship in early 1943, and Yamato spent the rest of the year, and much of 1944, moving between the major Japanese naval bases of Truk and Kure in response to American threats. Although present at the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, she played no part in the battle.
context_section_description: From the time of their construction, Yamato and her sister Musashi carried significant weight in Japanese culture. The battleships represented the epitome of Imperial Japanese naval engineering, and because of their size, speed, and power, visibly embodied Japan's determination and readiness to defend its interests against the Western Powers and the United States in particular. Shigeru Fukudome, chief of the Operations Section of the Imperial Japanese Navy General Staff, described the ships as "symbols of naval power that provided to officers and men alike a profound sense of confidence in their navy." Yamato's symbolic might was such that some Japanese citizens held the belief that their country could never fall as long as the ship was able to fight.
  Decades after the war, Yamato was memorialised in various forms by the Japanese. Historically, the word "Yamato" was used as a poetic name for Japan; thus, her name became a metaphor for the end of the Japanese empire. In April 1968, a memorial tower was erected at Cape Inutabu on Tokunoshima, an island in the Amami Islands of Kagoshima Prefecture, to commemorate the lives lost in Operation Ten-Go. In October 1974, Leiji Matsumoto created a new television series, Space Battleship Yamato, about rebuilding the battleship as a starship and its interstellar quest to save Earth. The series was a huge success, spawning eight feature films and four more TV series, the most recent of which was released in 2017. The series popularised the space opera. As post-war Japanese tried to redefine the purpose of their lives, Yamato became a symbol of heroism and of their desire to regain a sense of masculinity after their country's defeat in the war. Brought to the United States as Star Blazers, the animated series proved popular and established a foundation for anime in the North American entertainment market. The motif in Space Battleship Yamato was repeated in Silent Service, a popular manga and anime that explores issues of nuclear weapons and the Japan–US relationship. It tells the story of a nuclear-powered super submarine whose crew mutinies and renames the vessel Yamato, in allusion to the World War II battleship and the ideals she symbolises.
  In 2005, the Yamato Museum was opened near the site of the former Kure shipyards. Although intended to educate on the maritime history of post Meiji-era Japan, the museum gives special attention to its namesake; the battleship is a common theme among several of its exhibits, which includes a section dedicated to Matsumoto's animated series. The centrepiece of the museum, occupying a large section of the ground floor, is a 26.3-metre (86 ft) long model of Yamato (1:10 scale).
  Later that year, Toei released a 143-minute movie, Yamato, based on a book by Jun Henmi, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II; Tamiya released special editions of scale models of the battleship in conjunction with the film's release. Based on a book of the same name, the film is a tale about the sailors aboard the doomed battleship and the concepts of honour and duty. The film was shown on more than 290 screens across the country and was a commercial success, taking in a record 5.11 billion yen at the domestic box office.
  The 2019 Japanese film Archimedes no Taisen (アルキメデスの大戦, "Great War of Archimedes") based on a manga by Norifusa Mita tells the story of a dispute within the Japanese Navy over whether to fund the construction of aircraft carriers or a new battleship that would become Yamato. The film begins with the sinking of Yamato and ends with its commissioning.
caption: The 1:10 scale model at the Yamato Museum
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