Been having other Yamato thoughts. I got one of the Cosmo Falcon kits to paint up as a Black Tiger. And I was thinking about the wave-motion gun, in the
Andromeda, in the
Yamato... I was remembering the original Japanese dialogue in the original anime. I was thinking about the borrowed words for which there obviously wasn't a Japanese equivalent. "Target scope open" in Japanese is "taagetto sukopu open". But I was thinking about Wildstar/Kodai's line when he pulls the trigger of, "
Yamato... HASSHA!", which translates, basically, to "firing the
Yamato". He has helm control, is basically aiming the ship.
Got me thinking about some deep stuff, like why the
Yamato is the
Yamato -- historically and in the anime. The Yamato clan, in Japan's high medieval period, came to be respected pretty much as the epitome of Japaneseness. They became the ideal other samurai strove to emulate. I don't know how common it is in contemporary parlance over there, but for well over a century, someone who was really living the ideal would be described as "possessing Yamato spirit".
So when Japan was building their super-battleships in WWII, it was something of a no-brainer that they'd name the first as an embodiment of all that is perfectly Japanese. (And the second after their greatest mytho-historical warrior philosopher.) So not only was it a
huge morale blow when that ship was sunk, but that is 273% the reason Matsumoto chose it for the hero ship of the series. When the
Yamato makes it out of the latest Gamilas assault by the skin of its teeth, that's the Japanese soul triumphing over those who would keep it down. There's a whole lot of nationalist
gambatte! in the original anime.
And the wave-motion gun... I'll leave you with this quote for what it means in context, what took me years to understand why it gave me such chills:
He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.