Remembering the Yamato and Its Men

Requiem for Battleship Yamato by Yoshida Mitsuru; translated by Richard H. Minear (University of Washington: $16.95, illustrated)

For defeated nations there is literary prohibition, a censorship against militaristic arousal by prose and an official restriction as rigid as any conqueror’s ban on raising fresh armies.

Such was the subjugation of “Requiem for Battleship Yamato,” a naval officer’s eyewitness memoir of two ends--the sinking of a supposedly unsinkable warship in 1945 and the death of the Imperial Japanese Navy, once thought immortal.

Former Ens. Yoshida’s original work--a short, terse journal that one critic would later applaud for the author’s proud union with dead comrades and his honest antagonism toward the American enemy--was first squashed by the Civil Censorship Detachment in 1946. A longer, more definitive and tactfully edited version was banned in Japan until 1952.

A 40-Year Loss

The English translation has been delayed (but more by publishing disinterest than government censorship) until now . . . and that’s our 40-year loss of a little classic, a combat diary that shows the spiritual caress of John Gillespie Magee (“High Flight”), the personal realizations of Bert Stiles (“Big Friend, Little Friend”) and the elegant descriptions of awfulness that was Erich Marie Remarque’s.

Minear, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, supplements his translation (of the expanded, more reflective yet supposedly bowdlerized version of 1952) with light interpretation. It’s an effective and objective assist that provides the military and political dimension so often absent in narrow histories.

The battleship Yamato was built to outweigh, to outpace, to outgun ‘em all. In April, 1945, it lead a 10-ship task force, just about all Japan had to lose, on a desperate kamikaze sortie against American forces advancing on Japan from Okinawa. The Japanese ships were brushed aside and the Yamato shredded for hours by torpedoes, shells and bombs, until she rolled and sank with 3,000 sailors still inside.

Yoshida, who died in Tokyo in 1977, was a 22-year-old assistant radar officer on Yamato’s bridge throughout the engagement.

When he writes of life before the engagement, the narrative is a little sluggish, certainly standard. The hell of war. Officers who inspire leadership through fear and those who earn a following by respect. The sailor who would not live to see his own child. Constant self-questioning about the finality of it all: Would this be the last breakfast /sunrise / cigarette / hangover / breath?

A Grisly Eloquence

But once the Yamato engages the enemy, the raw, hammering ugliness of violent death and military purpose becomes Yoshida’s fascinating yet grisly eloquence. He writes: “Lieutenant Usubuch is killed by a direct hit. The young warrior who was both wise and courageous leaves behind not one bit of flesh, not one drop of blood.

“He hoped by dying to awaken new life. His body, offered up in the cause of a genuine national rebirth, has disappeared into thin air.”

Simple. Accessible. Extraordinary. It builds the same dreadful but authentic mood that television cameras carried from Vietnam to living room. It is Norman Mailer and Tim Page.

The work examines, and quite thoughtfully, the suicide mission, the kamikaze , Japan’s one-way response to “the prospect of imminent defeat.”

Oriental Failure

Translator Minear chastises the Western world and its military chroniclers (including Gen. William Westmoreland) for using the kamikaze as an example of an Oriental failure to value human life.

If that be the case, he suggests, what value the traditions of Masada, the Alamo or Dien Bien Phu?

“Heroism is heroism; no nation or race has a monopoly on it or even an insider track,” he concludes. “Yet it is all too easy to celebrate heroic action in a cause with which one identifies and denigrates heroic action on the part of any enemy.”