The Story Behind Building the Battleship Yamato: an Intellectually Stimulating Movie Choice for FReepers

IMDB Movies ^ | June 2021 Release | Takashi Yamazaki, Director

[poconopundit]

This weekend my wife and I watched a feature length Japanese movie on TV Japan entitled The Great War of Archimedes, a movie that has nothing to do with Archimedes, and there's actually only one -- terrific -- intense battle simulation scene in the flick.

I'll do my best here to convince you FReepers that this is a great choice to watch (in English subtitles) -- and try to not give the plot away.

What the Movie IS and IS NOT:

• It is NOT a War movie, though the first few minutes of his movie show a highly realistic and thrilling battle at sea. The director of this flick also directed Godzilla, and there are some spectacular special imaging effects at key moments.

• The closest parallel to well-known movies is A Beautiful Mind starring Russell Crowe. Yet, I think Archimedes does a far better job of showing what genius is made of.

• It IS a guy's flick. Besides a group of geishas, there are scant few women who appear in the film. Yet, the two young male stars are heart-throbs for Japanese women -- and the 50-ish actor who plays Admiral Yamamoto has that rare shibui quality, a refined gravity (Sean Connery) that women find attractive in certain older men -- but cannot find in a young man.

• It IS one of those movies that attracts a number of great Japanese actors. The older guys who play the admirals, ship builders, and architects are well-loved actors and among the finest older actors in Japan.

• It IS a movie that touches on themes that FReepers will eat up: government corruption, war history, war strategy, intrigue/infighting, deep state stuff, the glory of engineering, cost analysis, and human mathematical/thinking power as opposed to computer analytics.

• It IS a movie with some humorous moments as the young and old "rascals" duel with each other with arguments, dirty tricks, and amusing situations. Rigid military rules collide with the brainpower that can only be gotten from an eccentric mathematical savant.

• It IS a fictional Japanese movie about war preparations that fully exposes the group think and failed strategy that destroyed the Japanese nation in World War II. And it's kind of remarkable the Japanese could produce a movie that exposes that failure.

[poconopundit]

A film I highly recommend...

[The Louiswu]

Thanks. I’ll be sure to watch this one.

[poconopundit]

Good. To clarify, I should say it’s about the “planning” to build the Yamato. No actually building simulation is in the movie.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks poconopundit.

Yeah, great idea, largest-ever battleship, was present at some battles but didn’t fire its guns (it sez here) until Leyte Gulf (1944), which is where its sister ship was sunk. Yamato had its armament beefed up, in time to head to Okinawa, but never got there for some reason. :^)

The biggest blunder of WWII, and possibly the biggest military blunder of all time, was Japan’s attack on the US, which brought us lock stock and barrel into the war. It eclipses even Op Barbarossa, and by a large margin.

[NativeSon]

Sounds like an ad for “Starbalzers”.

[kiryandil]

The Battle Off Samar, October 25, 1944

Yamato engaged enemy surface forces for the first and only time at Samar, entering the battle two meters down by the bow and limited to 26 knots due to 3,000 tons of flooding caused by three armor-piercing bombs during the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea.

Yamato opened the battle at 06:59, firing on USS White Plains at an estimated range of 19.616 mi (17.046 nmi; 31.569 km), severely damaging USS White Plains with a near miss from her third salvo. The resulting gout of smoke from the stricken carrier obscured the target and convinced Yamato she was destroyed, so they ceased fire at 07:09. At 07:27, Yamato reported main and secondary battery hits on an "enemy cruiser" at 11.541 mi (10.029 nmi; 18.574 km), the time, range and bearing of which all correspond with the hits on the destroyer Johnston.

At 07:51, she turned her secondary battery on USS Raymond at a range of 5.736 mi (4.985 nmi; 9.232 km) before steering hard to port to avoid a torpedo salvo from the charging USS Hoel at 07:54. At 07:55, Yamato opened fire on Hoel with her 5 in (127 mm) anti-aircraft guns and was struck by an American 5 in (127 mm) shell in return.

Hemmed in by Haruna to starboard and her destroyers to port Yamato was forced to run due North away from the battle until the torpedoes ran out of fuel, finally turning back at 08:12.

Taffy 3 sez:

[Huskrrrr]

The world’s greatest battleship, just in time to see carrier warfare take center stage.

[texanyankee]

thanks for the head’s up!

[GraceG]

Well, given the fact that less than 60 years before battle they Japanese were living a very medieval lifestyle and there was no modern infrastructure....

Even though they had to tuck tail and run...

They went from primitive to modern at WARP speed!

And not because the west invaded and modernized their country for them...

They mostly modernized themselves!!!

The Japanese are a clever people!

[chajin]

It can also be rented for $4.99 here

[virgil]

I’ve seen this one. I was curious, so I rented it. It wasn’t bad. I’m guessing that some of Archimedes’s principles were used to determine how much the ship would cost to build based on the weight (or displacement?)of the materials in the short period of time he (the boy genius) had to figure it out.

[workerbee]

Thanks for the info, I’ll tell my husband. He’s been into foreign (esp. Asian-produced) movies lately.

[PROCON]

Obligatory Animal House reference

[BlueLancer]

Looks like a movie worth seeing ...

[CJ Wolf]

That does.

My Dad was an electrician aprentice helping to build out the USS Princeton when 16 in Philly. Signed up the next year.

[rlmorel]

Thank you for the film recommendation, poconopundit...much appreciated.

[rlmorel]

I read an excellent book (Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II) that discussed exactly this dynamic...it was VERY interesting and insightful, IMO.

I find the Japanese to be an utter paradox to my Western mind.

I lived there as a military dependent in the Sixties.

I really liked Japan...it was complete and total culture shock...I moved there when I was nine, and it was like moving to another planet.

The sights...the sounds...the smell of a combination of sewage, diesel exhasust, and fish. The kids in large gaggles going to and from school with the uniforms and masks with hats and backpacks, the three wheeled trucks, the fake food in restaurant windows, the pachinko ball parlors, the clean, unfinished wooden house interiors with the rice paper panels, the toilets that were a porcelain hole in the floor..everything was so different.

I thought the people were wonderful. When we moved to the Philippines after that, I got my first real exposure to the other side of the Japanese. The Filipinos were treated harshly under Japanese occupation, and they had not forgotten.

Quite a dichotomy. I came to view them as people capable of appreciation of simplicity and beauty, but also capable of great brutality.

I guess that is true of all people, but those characteristics just seemed more tightly compressed in the Japanese to me, more of two completely opposite extremes coexisting in the same individual human. I did, and still have a great appreciation for them as a people.

One of my favorite stories about Western encounters with Japanese culture was the famous journey the USS Astoria made to Japan in 1939 carrying the ashes of the highly respected Japanese ambassador Hirosi Saito who had died while in the USA. (You can read about it here: The Saito Cruise 1939

US-Japanese relations were quite difficult at that time, but this was a special case.

IIRC, even though this was a diplomatic mission, there was a lot of military tension on both sides.

When they prepared to go ashore, Captain Turner selected the biggest, brawniest sailors he could find to serve as the armed honor guard for the delivery of the ashes, and even (to the chagrin and irritation of the Marine Corps detachment aboard) took the biggest Marines and made them wear sailors uniforms (you can see below, wearing the flat hats!)

Anyway, it was a big to-do, the crew was treated on liberty by the Japanese quite well, but in the formal dinner party of all the ships officers held with prominent Japanese Naval officers, there was real tension and barely disguised (sometimes not disguised) hostility by the Imperial Japanese Navy representatives towards their American counterparts.

But to the point of our discussion of Japanese women...one US Navy officer later said (I have to paraphrase, I don't have it exactly) "I could never understand how the Japanese women could be so beautiful and sweet, and the Japanese men could be such sons-of-bitches!"

Well, on August 9, 1942, Japanese sent the USS Astoria to the bottom of Ironbottom Sound during the Battle of Savo Island. Quite an ironic turnaround there.

[Captain Walker]

The biggest blunder of WWII, and possibly the biggest military blunder of all time, was Japan’s attack on the US, which brought us lock stock and barrel into the war.

You may or may not be surprised to know that there was no small number of high-ranking Japanese officers who were telling Yamamoto this very same thing when he first brought up the idea in January 1941.

You would probably be surprised to learn how many American military officers and members of Congress dismissed concerns about the vulnerability of Pearl Harbor for the same reason.

[poconopundit]

Thanks, SunkenCiv. Agree. Oh, did I mentioned there’s an unexpected twist in the movie?