Battleship Yamato: Of War, Beauty and Irony

The Battleship Yamato, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, was the most powerful warship of World War II and represented the climax, as it were, of the Japanese warrior traditions of the samurai – the ideals of honour, discipline and self-sacrifice that had immemorially ennobled the Japanese national consciousness. Stoically poised for battle in the spring of 1945 – when even Japan’s last desperate technique of arms, the kamikaze, was running short – Yamato arose as the last magnificent arrow in the imperial quiver of Emperor Hirohito. Here, Jan Morris not only tells the dramatic story of the magnificent ship itself – from secret wartime launch to futile sacrifice at Okinawa – but, more fundamentally, interprets the ship as an allegorical figure of war itself, in its splendour and its squalor, its heroism and its waste. Drawing on rich naval history and rhapsodic metaphors from international music and art, Battleship Yamato is a work of grand ironic elegy. "The short, illustrated book Morris has written about the Yamato is what she calls 'a reverie' on the varied emotions that war summons up…I think it's safe to say that Morris has also written a reverie on accepting the inevitability of death… This book itself signals yet another end: Certainly, it will be one of the very last books written about World War II by an author who saw active service in that war. That sobering fact only adds to the elegiac resonance of this magnificent little book." ― Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air. Published to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the sinking of Yamato (7 April 2025).