New movie chronicles the suicide mission of Japan's Yamato battleship

TOKYO (Reuters) - A symbol of honour and bravery in the service of a lost cause, or the epitome of meaningless sacrifice?

Japan's giant battleship Yamato, commissioned eight days after Pearl Harbor and sunk on a suicidal mission in the final months of the Second World War, embodies a painful duality that persists six decades after the nation's defeat.

Now the tale of the Yamato, the biggest battleship ever built and the pride of the Imperial Japanese Navy, is being retold in a film, "Yamato: The Last Battle," to be released this month.

Made with help from Japan's armed forces and using a replica two-thirds the size of the 263-metre-long battleship, Toei Co.'s "Yamato" is the latest in a string of military movies in a land whose post-war pacifism is colliding with a new nationalism.

The release also coincides with a chill in Japan's ties with China and South Korea, where bitter memories of Tokyo's past aggression have been inflamed by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's repeated visits to the Yasukuni shrine, which honours convicted war criminals along with the country's 2.5 million war dead.

The makers of "Yamato" bristle at any suggestion the film is intended to glorify war or militarism.

"My message is about people's courage to live, and I want to have people think again how to live with self-awareness and pride as Japanese," producer Haruki Kadokawa said.

"We don't label our film an antiwar film, but the message is very clear. We are depicting the events of 60 years ago to get across the idea that we never want to go to war again."

But some say viewers could take away a different lesson.

"There is, of course, the danger that these kinds of movies glorify the war and hinder people from thinking about the aggressive side of the war and Asian victims," said Sven Saaler, an associate professor at the University of Tokyo.

"The basic message is that it's worthwhile to sacrifice your life for your country."

The 64,000-ton Yamato, whose name refers both to the country of Japan and its traditional culture, has long held a special place in the Japanese post-war psyche.

Boys still put together plastic models of the ship, in its day a technological marvel with awesome firepower that many believed was invincible.

Many adults who grew up in the 1970s were fans of "Space Battleship Yamato," a cartoon series in which the vessel was raised from its watery grave and flown into space.

"Japanese people feel sympathy for something that has a tragic end," Kazushige Todaka, director of the Yamato Museum in Kure, Hiroshima prefecture, where the battleship was built. "The history of the Yamato began with the war and ended with the war. It is one symbol of the Pacific war."

Launched in 1940, the Yamato was already outmoded because of the growing role of airpower.

Its final mission was in April, 1945, when it set sail for Japan's southern island of Okinawa in a desperate effort to delay a U.S. invasion of the mainland, Japan's leaders knew the war was lost.

The foray was the naval equivalent of Japan's kamikaze suicide bombers. A mere 22 hours after the start of a U.S. assault by some 390 planes, the Yamato exploded and sank. Fewer than 300 of some 3,000 crew members survived.

"It is generally recognised throughout Japan - and Japanese history has decreed - that the last mission of the Yamato was a useless, meaningless mission," said the film's director, Junya Sato. "It was folly."

The movie, which opens in the present and includes a clip of Japanese sailors returning from a refueling mission in the Indian Ocean, makes only the briefest mention of the war's origins.

Echoing an account in a 1952 memoir written by a real-life survivor of the Yamato's last mission, one scene shows junior officers arguing over the meaning of their imminent deaths. The emotional debate ends when one officer says the defeat is required to set Japan on a new path: "We are pioneers in the rebirth of Japan. Isn't that our hearts' desire?"

In some ways, experts say, that struggle to make sense of the millions of lives lost by Japanese sailors and soldiers still haunts the country's efforts to come to terms with the war.

"No one would ever say it's a waste," Prof. Saaler said, referring to comments by Koizumi and other Japanese leaders. "It's always said that the sacrifice was not in vain and that today's prosperity is based on that sacrifice."