The Yamato was the world’s largest battleship, completed before Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately, it was also the last battleship, at least for Japan, for it was damaged at Leyte Gulf and then sunk in an attempt to reach Okinawa. As far as I can determine, Japan had made only one earlier movie about the Yamato, a Shintoho cheapie in 1953, but the myth had long haunted the nation’s entertainment, spawning the incredibly popular Space Battleship Yamato manga and numerous films and TV, mostly animated, that have thus far maintained almost fifty years of popularity.
The Yamato Museum opened in April 2005, where we first meet Makiko observing the exhibits and underwater film of the ship’s wreckage, an opening, that, along with Joe Hisaishi’s incessant score and a big song over the credits, can’t help but remind us of Titanic, but of course we don’t have an epic love story. One day before the sixtieth anniversary of the Yamato’s sinking, Makiko is trying to find a boat that will take her out to the place where the wreckage was found to scatter her father’s ashes. 
She convinces Kamio (Tatsuya Nakadai), who will turn out to have been one of the few survivors, and when she shows him a photo, he recognizes three petty officers who had been pals on the ship when Kamio himself had joined it as an underage volunteer. Thus we follow two strands in the war story, Kamio and his friend Nishi, with some others of the same intake to the crew, and the three petty officers and pals Uchida (Makiko’s adoptive father), Moriwaki, and Karaki, whom Kamio observes and admires.
In the course of the flashbacks, we find all the expected points of a war movie, but basically an American war movie set on the Japanese side – more about a Band of Brothers than about a commitment to the Emperor. Compared to earlier movies about the Japanese war experience, it is surprising how much Yamato resembles a Euro/American war movie – the three pals are an unlikely trio because they are not officers and have utterly different posts and backgrounds. Uchida commands the anti-aircraft gun to which Kamio is assigned, while Moriwaki is a cook and Karaki a medic. But they all three joined the ship for its first sea trials and while the three pals may fight with each other, they are all but are inseparable when off duty and “have each others’ backs” in any crisis. Meanwhile, the new recruits learn their jobs, make mistakes and are punished, the Battle of Leyte Gulf introduces the carnage, then there is a respite as the ship returns to port, the central characters return home to family and girlfriends and possible romance. Since the Yamato was built and based in Kure, a port near Hiroshima, the Bomb lurks in the background, and the women who love Uchida and Kamio eventually will be killed while working there after the Yamato sinks.
Then the last combat mission is presented in great detail, with wounds, deaths, explosions, personal sacrifices, etc. The deaths are generally realistic, the gore genuine in appearance but not dwelt upon. As Makiko searches for the true past of her father, it is something of a salute to Japan’s “Greatest Generation,” reflected in the reactions of the teenaged deckhand who has never heard anything specific about the War.
Yamato, like Lorelei, walks a fine line between depicting the heroism of “our brave boys” and the waste of their lives in the course of the war. Thus, it is more in the tradition of Seiji Maruyama’s naval movies in which the war was lost in the high command while the sailors fought nobly and bravely. Everyone knows the last mission is a suicide mission, but almost no one glories in the chance to die. The Captain and Admiral know that without air cover the ship will probably never even reach Okinawa, much less accomplish the mission given when it reaches there, but they have their orders and will follow them. Junior officers get in fights about the higher command staying on shore, even though there is no fleet left for them to command. 
Uchida is hospitalized after Leyte, where he lost an eye, but stows away on board not to die for the Emperor but to die with his buddies. Moriwaki saves Kamio in the water but swims back in search of Uchida. Such attitudes were not depicted even during the revisionist movies of the sixties and seventies, not even in Marine Cadets which has a similar story line or among the men portrayed in The Battle of Okinawa, where the officers except Nakadai all seem to simply be waiting for the proper moment to commit seppuku.
Dialogue for the most part is predictable, given the type of movie. Nevertheless, two rather interesting exchanges occur. A young sailor directly asks the Captain (in itself something that would never happen in earlier movies or real life on a ship) to explain the difference between bushido and chivalry; the Captain replies that chivalry teaches the honorable way to prepare for life, and bushido the honorable way to prepare for death. The second comes when the junior officers are fighting each other; the officer who breaks them up says the high command has stayed ashore to prepare the 100 million who will follow the Yamato into death, underlining the idea that the entire population of Japan, like those on Saipan, would die fighting. Even so, all men are instructed to leave their post when the command “Abandon Ship” is given and only a handful, like Uchida, opt to go down fighting, though they make sure the surviving seamen around them follow the order.
Yamato was quite popular in Japan, grossing almost as much as Japan Sinks and Mitani’s all-star comedy Uchiden Hotel. It would have had to be, given the expense of the production, which blends full-size sets with CGI almost seamlessly. Based on a popular novel, it is tempting to see its success as part of a rising interest in WWII as well as a nostalgia for a time when Japan was a great power and a re-awakening of Japanese militarism in the general public, along with movies such as Lorelei and Aegis. It was probably more a factor of the thirst for home-grown special effects spectaculars like Japan Sinks.
