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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Japanese popular culture has engaged with experiences and memories of WWII since the 1950s, starting with manga (comic books) and moving on to some of the most widely known and memorable animated war films that have been produced since the 1960s, such as Barefoot Gen (1983) and Grave of the Fireflies (1988). A number of animation artists have expressed loss and hope in their works on this subject. As Napier argues, Japanese animation has explored history and memory beyond simple entertainment and has presented important issues still relevant to the audience today. This essay analyzes two futuristic science fictions, one TV and one film series, made over two decades apart: Space Battleship Yamato (produced in the 1970s) and Silent Service (in the 1990s). Both explicitly refer to WWII: in Space Battleship Yamato, after having been sunk to the bottom of the ocean off Okinawa towards the very end of the war, the battleship Yamato is revived by the Japanese government in order to save humanity from an alien attack, whereas a constant battle between Japan and international communities over the ownership of a nuclear submarine occurs in Silent Service. After a brief introduction of the narratives of the two animation series, the author examines their reception at the time of their production, and discusses the ways in which they rework the memory of loss and vision of hope in response to contemporary national and international politics.
[1] Lisa Yoneyama. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) 27.
[2] Ibid, 27
[3] Ibid, 28.
[4] I am indebted to two former students for my initial interest in the Yamato series. Karline McLain's paper “Remembering the Past, Recasting Identity” linked the sinking of the Yamato to the atomic bombings while Eric Carmen's presentation on the original battleship Yamato made me aware of how accurate was the anime version of the historical event and inspired me to explore reasons behind this obsessive attention to verisimilitude.
[5] See “All Aboard to the Land of Dreams,” an interview with Ishiguro Noboru, one of the Yamato directors, for an account of the beginning of Yamato fandom. (Animerica, Vol. 3, No. 8, 1995), 7 and 9. Ironically, the Yamato series, renamed Star Blazers and edited for an American audience, is also considered to be the initial inspiration behind American anime fandom. See Robert Fenelon, “Talking about my Star Blazers Generation,” (Animerica, Vol. 3, No.8, 1995), 8 and 10, and Walter Amos, “The Star Blazers You Didn't See” (Animerica, Vol. 3, No. 8, 1995), 10.
[6] Animerica Editorial Board, “Yamato Forever,” (Animerica, Vol. 3, No. 8, 1995), 6.
[7] More so than either Star Wars or Star Trek, space itself becomes a character in the Yamato series since much of the action takes place while the ship is on interstellar voyages (beautifully rendered in lush, dreamlike imager), rather than on planets. The fascination with the element of space may connect with the modern Japanese consciousness of the Pacific Ocean, which surrounds their island nation, and more specifically, with the crucial role the Pacific in both the successes and failures of World War II. For a discussion of the Pacific in Japanese science fiction see Thomas Schnellbacher, “Has the Empire Sunk Yet? -The Pacific in Japanese Science Fiction,” in Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 29, Part 3, 2002, 382-396.
[8] Yoshida Mitsuru, “The ‘Space Cruiser Yamato’ Generation,” (Japan Echo, Vol. VI. No. 1, 1979), 82.
[9] Yoshikuni Igarashi. Bodies of Memory. (Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press, 2000), 167.
[10] Marilyn Ivy. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 14.
[11] See the discussion by Yoshida Mitsuru, “The ‘Space Cruiser Yamato’ Generation,” op cit., 85-87.
[12] Ibid., 86.
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