From mourning to allegory: Post-3.11 Space Battleship Yamato in motion

Abstract

Since 1977, when the first movie version was premiered, Uchūsenkan Yamato (Space Battleship Yamato) has fueled the continuance of an earlier anime boom in Japan, and in the past decades, the anime text has generated multifarious interpretations. One of the most widely embraced readings contextualizes Yamato within Japan's defeat in the Second World War and this approach to the anime not only celebrated its scientific imagination but also legitimized, with a revisionist tone, the country's righteousness in the war. In the wake of the 3/11 earthquake and the subsequent Fukushima disaster, however, this line of canonical reading has declined. In turn, users of internet social media such as Twitter and 2 Channel have revamped the significance of Yamato, largely extolling the anime text as a prognosis of the Fukushima crisis. Surrounding Yamato, those clamorous voices on the internet appear to have grown into what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call ‘multitude’, a social body of collaboration. Online constituents of multitudes are, though still randomly and loosely connected, gravitating to Yamato's newly discovered quality as the allegory of apocalyptic post-3/11 Japan. Whereas concrete action is yet to be taken, the internet multitudes of Yamato fans have engaged in various brainstorming conversations that concern Japan's future and its relation with nuclear technology.