Battleship Yamato: Of War, Beauty and Irony

Jan Morris

Hardcover

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The battleship Yamato, of the Imperial Japanese Navy, was the most powerful warship of World War II and represented the climax, as it were, of the Japanese warrior traditions of the samurai--the ideals of honor, discipline, and self-sacrifice that had immemorially ennobled the Japanese national consciousness. Stoically poised for battle in the spring of 1945--when even Japan's last desperate technique of arms, the kamikaze, was running short--Yamato arose as the last magnificent arrow in the imperial quiver of Emperor Hirohito. Here, Jan Morris not only tells the dramatic story of the magnificent ship itself--from secret wartime launch to futile sacrifice at Okinawa--but, more fundamentally, interprets the ship as an allegorical figure of war itself, in its splendor and its squalor, its heroism and its waste. Drawing on rich naval history and rhapsodic metaphors from international music and art, Battleship Yamato is a work of grand ironic elegy.

Book Details

Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publish Date: Mar 27th, 2018
Pages: 96
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 5.10in - 7.60in - 0.60in - 0.65lb
EAN: 9781631493423
Categories: • Wars & Conflicts - World War II - General• Military - Naval• Asia - Japan

About the Author

Morris, Jan: - Jan Morris (1926-2020) lived and wrote as James Morris until 1972. She resided with her partner, Elizabeth Morris, in northwest Wales, between the mountains and the sea. Her many books included In My Mind's Eye, Coronation Everest, and the Pax Britannica trilogy.

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

The short, illustrated book Morris has written about the Yamato is what she calls 'a reverie' on the varied emotions that war summons up...I think it's safe to say that Morris has also written a reverie on accepting the inevitability of death....This book itself signals yet another end: Certainly, it will be one of the very last books written about World War II by an author who saw active service in that war. That sobering fact only adds to the elegiac resonance of this magnificent little book.--Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air