Yamato: Symbol of Japanese defeat in WWII or simple steakhouse?
We are getting another hibachi-style restaurant in Norman in between Red Lobster and Saltgrass. The name of this establishment is Yamato.
I thought this was an interesting choice in names considering the history around the Yamato class battleship and the namesake flagship, the Yamato. It turns out that Yamato means quite a few different things in Japanese culture. The main usage for the word Yamato is as a name for mainland Japanese. That’s what the name probably means, but I set out to write an article about the history of the Yamato battleship and I plan to do just that. Got it‽
The Yamato class battleship and the namesake ship the Yamato were launched and commissioned near the end of 1941. The five proposed Yamato class ships were designed to out-class any ship the Americans could possibly build (The size of our ships was limited by the width and length of the locks at the Panama Canal). At 460mm her guns were a full 2 inches wider than the largest Allied guns. That’s big. Real big.
From there it doesn’t look so good for the Yamato. She lost her flagship status when it was given to her sister ship the Musashi. Then she spent the next two and a half years being added to or fixed with no real combat seen. She was hit by a torpedo shot by the USS Skate. The next battle she saw was during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in which her sister ship the Musashi was destroyed by American airpower.
Her final mission was a suicide mission. On April 6th 1945 she sailed against more than 1,000 American ships. The plan was to drive her ashore at Okinawa making herself an unsinkable gun battery. This plan was not realized, far from it. She was detected leaving port by US submarines and had no aircover during this mission. The Yamato put up an impressive display of firepower with no real results, the American airplanes began strafing runs with follow-up bombing runs at 0830 April 6th, 1945. The aircraft were able to easily cut the Yamato’s defenses and drop the bombs from 500ft about her deck saying that, “at this distance a miss was impossible”. Torpedo planes were launched and drove the attack to only one side of the ship (port) causing her to list and capsize. Around 1400 hours the command was given to abandon ship. Only 280 of the 2,778 souls aboard were saved. Only 10 American aircraft and 12 airmen were lost to the Yamato. Naval gunfire took no part in Yamato’s demise.
This marked the end of an era for Japanese military superiority, served as a death knell for the Japanese war effort and punctuated the fact that the, “battleship had been supplanted by the aircraft carrier as the queen of the sea”.
It’s a real shame that a ship with such great history could be represented by such a lacklustre restaurant. Then again, it probably is called Yamato because that’s another word for the Japanese people. I like my version better though, you can taste the defeat.