Otoko-tachi no Yamato (2005)

Director:

Junya Sato

Writers:

Jun Henmi (novel)
Junya Sato (screenplay)

Release Date:

17 December 2005 (Japan)

Genre:

War

Plot:

Makiko Uchida arrives in a southern Japanese port hoping to find a boat that will take her to the final...

Plot Keywords:

Yamato | Battleship | WWII | Based On Novel

Awards:

6 wins & 7 nominations

Cast

Takashi Sorimachi	...	Shohachi Moriwaki
Shido Nakamura	...	Mamoru Uchida (as Shidô Nakamura)
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Yû Aoi	...	Taeko
Jun'ichi Haruta	...	Hisao Koike
Ryô Hashidume	...	Yoshiharu Kojima (as Ryô Hashizume)
Ryûzô Hayashi	...	Ryunosuke Kusaka
Hiroyuki Hirayama	...	Tamaki
Hirotarô Honda	...	Tetsuzo Furumura
Hisashi Igawa	...	The Chairman
Sosuke Ikematsu	...	Atsushi
Kenji Kaneko	...	Machimura
Hiroshi Katsuno	...	Nobue Morishita
Ken'ichi Matsuyama	...	Katsumi Kamio (15 years old)
Takashi Morimiya	...	Omori
Fumito Moriwaki
Kazushige Nagashima	...	Usubuchi
Tatsuya Nakadai	...	Katsumi Kamio (75 years old)
Umitarou Nozaki	...	Jiro Nomura
Eiji Okuda	...	Kosaku Ariga
Hiromi Sakimoto	...	Sumio Tsuneta
Kayoko Shiraishi	...	Sue Kamio
Kyoka Suzuki	...	Makiko Uchida (as Kyôka Suzuki)
Noboru Takachi	...	Kawazoe
Atsuko Takahata	...	Tsune Tamaki
Kenji Takaoka	...	Shiro Mogi
Shinobu Terajima	...	Ayako
Kenta Uchino	...	Tetsuya Nishi
Dai Watanabe	...	Toshio Date
Tetsuya Watari	...	Seiichi Ito
Jundai Yamada	...	Masao Karaki
Kimiko Yo	...	Sayo Nishi

Directed by
Junya Sato		(as Jun'ya Satô)

Writing credits
Jun Henmi		(novel "Ketteiban Otoko-tachi no Yamato")
Junya Sato		(screenplay)

Produced by
Haruki Kadokawa	....	planner: Kadokawa Haruki Jimusho
Noriko Koyanagi	....	producer
Sunao Sakagami	....	planner: Tôei
Tan Takaiwa	....	executive producer: Tôei

Original Music by
Joe Hisaishi

Cinematography by
Yoshitaka Sakamoto

Film Editing by
Takeo Yoneda

Casting by
Yasuhiro Fukuoka

Art Direction by
Noriyuki Kondo

Production Management
Toshiki Komatsu	....	production manager: second unit
Keitaro Shimizu	....	unit production manager

Second Unit Director or Assistant Director
Tohru Harada	....	second unit director
Megumi Sawada	....	assistant director
Megumi Sawada	....	second unit director
Koichiro Yamashita	....	assistant director

Sound Department
Nobuhiko Matsukage	....	sound

Special Effects by
Hiroshi Butsuda	....	special effects supervisor

Visual Effects by
Masato Aonuma	....	cg artist: NTT Media Lab
Hiroshi Ihara	....	miniature chief model maker
Norihiko Iwasaki	....	miniature producer
Takashi Kato	....	miniature model maker
Taro Kiba	....	miniature design and construction
Chieko Kurokawa	....	digital compositor: NTT Media Lab
Kôji Misada	....	digital compositor: NTT Media Lab
Hiroki Mori	....	digital compositor: NTT Media Lab
Koichi Noguchi	....	visual effects supervisor
Shinji Ohagi	....	digital compositor: NTT Media Lab
Kazuhiro Shigihara	....	cg artist: NTT Media Lab
Takeshi Shin	....	visual effects supervisor: NTT Media Lab
Isamu Tajima	....	miniature set construction
Kyoko Yamamoto	....	digital compositor: NTT Media Lab

Camera and Electrical Department
Takeshi Okubo	....	gaffer

Casting Department
Emi Fukuda	....	casting assistant
Emi Fukuda	....	casting secretary
Taketsugu Nishijima	....	casting secretary

Music Department
Hiroyuki Akita	....	music engineer
Suminobu Hamada	....	music engineer
Joe Hisaishi	....	conductor
Joe Hisaishi	....	orchestrator
Hikaru Ishikawa	....	music producer
Tsuyoshi Nagabuchi	....	composer: theme song
Suminobu Hamada	....	music mixer (uncredited)

Other crew
Shigeyuki Endô	....	publicist

Production Companies

• Asahi Shimbun Newspaper, The
• Chugoku Shimbun Newspaper
• Hiroshima Home TV
• Hokkaido Broadcasting Co.
• Kadokawa Haruki Jimusho
• Nagasaki International Television Broadcasting
• TV Asahi
• Toei Animation Company
• Toei Company
• Tokyo FM Broadcasting Co.

Distributors

• Toei Company (2005) (Japan) (theatrical)
• Atlantic Film (2006) (Sweden) (DVD)
• Cultmovies (2009) (Germany) (DVD)
• Future Film (2007) (Finland) (DVD)

Special Effects

• Fabgraphics (visual effects)
• Frameworks Entertainment Inc. (visual effects)
• Marbling FineArts (miniature effects)
• Marine Post (visual effects)
• Motor/lieZ (visual effects)
• NTT Media Lab (visual effects)
• Panasonic DV Workshops Digital Studio DU (visual effects)
• Polygon Pictures (visual effects)
• Toei Labo Tech (visual effects)

Other Companies

• Mozart Hall, Katsushika Symphony Hills  music recorded at
• Nippon Crown  music production management
• Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra  orchestra
• Wonder City  music production management
• Wonder Station  music mixed at
• Wonder Station  music recorded at

Also Known As:

Yamato (International: English title)

Runtime:

145 min

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese

Colour:

Colour

Certification:

Singapore:PG | Finland:K-15

Filming Locations:

Kure, Hiroshima, Japan

Company:

Asahi Shimbun Newspaper, The

Goofs:

Factual errors: At least one attacking US plane in the film has the fat black and white "three stripe" pattern on the wings and body. While it is an authentic period detail visible on many old images, it wasn't used in the Pacific. Wrong side of the world! The high-visibility black-white pattern was used during the D-Day invasion to make it easier for Allied pilots and antiaircraft crews to avoid firing upon "friendly" aircraft. (The more discreet chevron mark on Coalition vehicles during Gulf War I had a similar purpose.)

Very powerful film, and revolutionary, too

I am an American PhD student based in both Japan and Micronesia doing extensive fieldwork with the survivors of the Pacific War in the Pacific Islands and Japan--as well as the families of war dead. Since I have been really involved most recently with the families of soldiers and sailors who died in the Pacific, I naturally wanted to see this movie.

I found myself with tears in my eyes from the very beginning, because it was as if all the black and white photographs I have been generously shown by these families were coming to life--the young faces of these sailors, frightened, proud, and eager to live up to their responsibilities, were very true to what I sense was really happening in the 1940s.

I have to say, unlike the very propagandist flavor of many American films about the Pacific War, including most recently 'Pearl Harbor,' this film really delves into the traumatic aspects of masculinity in general and having to live up to "being a man" in Japan just as much as it celebrates the humanity of the people involved. Many American films, with the exception of 'Saving Private Ryan' and several films about Vietnam, tend to stick to very comic-like stark depictions of heroes and villains and an overall sense of being "victimized" by the enemy. Here, the enemy is not the United States but rather masculinity and male pride itself, as well as the whole tragic story they create.

As such, it is a welcome remedy to way too much American-biased victory narratives that obscure the face of the Japanese military, and to films that portray menacing, dehumanized battalions of Japanese soldiers advancing forth without any legitimate context of their own. We see in this film the faces of these young men and understand what situation they were coming from.

That said, clearly the film was trying to be sensitive to war bereaved and to the official narratives of Japanese pretexts for war, and in that sense I feel they overdid it a little. We don't get a sense, for instance, about Japan's colonial presence throughout Asia and the Pacific--only the vague notion that Japan somehow got involved in war. Still, this isn't really a film about why the war happened, but rather about how it was to live and fight in the immediate time preceding Japanese surrender. In that sense, I do want to make the critique that this film really could have done with even MORE contextualization and solid research of popular Japanese culture at the time, because this would have added even more to its convincing sense of reality. For instance, the soundtrack would have been greatly enhanced with some of the evocative marching music and the ballads on the radio in the 1930s and 1940s that encouraged young men to join the navy and go south to the South Seas.

These songs are still sung even by the bereaved families who go back to visit the places where their loved ones died, so it would have been quite powerful if we got to hear them throughout the film. The absence of small details like this, some rather poorly-imitated Japanese regional dialects, and some of the melodramatic overacting by a few members of the cast, detracted somewhat from the overall production. But in general, this is a very fine film, extremely well acted (and compassionately so) by its cast.

I have been reading a book about the film in Japanese and it's fascinating to learn how so many of the cast worked directly with Japanese veterans and the bereaved families in order to develop their characters and their behavior. So in many respects this film is not only based on the realities of battle (which are really just the backdrop) but on the real life realities of war and on being a young man in the Japanese Imperial Navy in 1944-1945.

In all, it's an extremely meaningful film that needs to be distributed widely through the world. I know there is a lot of resistance to its release in China and Korea, understandably, but I think this is a portrait of what was going on for Japanese at the time and as such could even work as a tool to facilitate better understanding in these countries. It is essential that more compassionate films like this are made that go on to address the complexity and horror of what happened in Asia and the Pacific-- to the people whose lives were colonized and ruined by Japanese aggression, but at least it's a start. It appears to me that Japanese popular culture is finally ready to address the war in all of its ugliness and begin to heal some of these old wounds.