Beginnings, Ends, and Hero Ships

If you have a love for literature, and have not yet done so, check out

Alexandru Constantin

at the Deceneus Journal and its’ accompanying podcast.

Episode 29 looks at beginnings and ends, with Alexandru and his frequent co-host

Phisto Sobanii

discussing what the podcast has covered, and where it is going. Along the way they touch on the Battlestar Galactica reboot and the very (but not exclusively) western concept of the Hero Ship.

Why

Ships have names. More to the point, they have personalities. Nicknames. Sometimes serious, sometimes irreverent, and often more than one. The Enterprise is a name attached to eight US Navy ships, one under construction now, three of them carriers. One was the first nuclear carrier, nicknamed the “Big E” like its’ World War II predecessor. Crewmembers of the Nimitz-class carrier Theodore Roosevelt would sometimes refer to her as the “Teddy Ruxpin” in the 90s, after a talking doll.

The point is that sailors and their ships have always had a bond. In the west, they were usually referred to as “she” - the German WW2 ship Bismark being an exception - often treated and spoken of as if she were a person with a will and spirit of her own.

This carried forward to literature about ships and sailing, where the ships themselves were as much a character in the story as anything else. Away from land, or as a means to get to one from the other, they were a common living and working space shared by a handful, hundreds, or even thousands of men.

One might, in a story, especially if the point of view is that of an admiral or ships commander, speak of a ship’s commander as doing such-and-such, but just as often, and almost universally by any crew, one speaks of a ship doing things. The Iowa trained her guns, the Yorktown launched her planes, Arleigh Burke’s destroyers arrived.

Hero Ships

In some cases, the ship isn’t just another character, but one of the leading heroes of the story and the very center of it, embodying hope and valor and not just the how the characters get around and main setting. One such case, perhaps, is the Enterprise from Star Trek. There is also the Millenium Falcon and other science fiction ships who’s names are remembered long after those of their crew. This is much more true of the Battlestar Galactica - a series I am deeply torn about because of how the ending threw everything away, but which nonetheless sucked me in. Adama and the leadership treated her as an irreplaceable resource not to be squandered, and yet time after time, there was no choice but to lay it all on the line, roll the dice, and hope she carries through. And she did.

One not mentioned though was a childhood memory, my first awareness of the ship being as much a character, perhaps more so is it continued even as crew came, went, lived, and died, and that is the Yamato.

Star Blazers, aka Space Battleship Yamato

I was lucky as my bus in middle school let off nearly at my front door, and the local DC tv station had started showing a new animated series about a Japanese battleship taking an epic journey to save the world from an alien invasion. The show started just after I got home, barely giving me time to finish up my homework - doing said homework being a habit that did not carry forward into high school.

It was very different. People died, and mistakes had lasting consequences. It had awesome weapons rivaling the early lensman books, faster than light travel, cool fighters, and a ticking clock they had to beat or Earth would be left a radioactive cinder. The crew set forth on what was almost certainly a suicide run on the barest hope they could stop the war and recover the promised technology that might clean up the biosphere.

And who could not fall in love with this?

Or this?

No wonder it was one of the most popular series in Japan, with several primary seasons, several movies including a more recent live-action one, and a full reboot spanning several seasons. The art style of the original series will be familiar to those also familiar with Leiji Matsumoto’s Captain Harlock and Galaxy Express 999.

It wasn’t until much later that the allegory hit home. It didn’t need to.

The Yamato was a symbol of pride for Japan. In the podcast I linked at the beginning, Phisto relates a story that the Yamato was being sent on a suicide run to ground itself and to act like a heavily armored artillery battery. They were only supposed to be given enough fuel for the one way trip, but the dockworkers insisted on giving her a full fuel load.

Even back then, she was a hero ship.

In the series, Earth is being continuously bombarded from afar by radiation bombs that have already rendered the surface unlivable, and will over time extinguish every form of advanced life. Earth’s fleets and active defenses have been shredded.

I can’t speak for the Japanese, but this bears a striking resemblance to not only the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and concerns of radiation damage, but the ongoing bombing campaign of Tokyo and the utter destruction of the fleet and air force.

A messenger arrives bearing a spark of hope. A cure exists to cleanse the planet, as well as technology new to humanity - a faster than light drive and a directed weapon capable of destruction on a massive but initially unknown scale. We later find out it is capable of wiping out whole fleets and large planetoids, bringing about another layer of ethical questions.

This technology is used to build a new spaceship camouflaged under the now-exposed ruins of the wreck of the Yamato, a platform hopefully capable of either outrunning or outgunning whatever it faces, crewed by the untested leftovers of the Earth navy, commanded by a living legend and one of the few survivors of the initial battles to defend earth.

This echoes the last journey of the original Yamato, but allowing the ship to redeem itself of its failures, and symbolically, Japan as well.

Interestingly, while the english Star Blazers dub noted that the ship had been the Yamato, it was dubbed the Argo in reference to Jason and the Argonauts, somewhat appropriate for the type of journey she took.

I’m not spoiling much to reveal that Iscandar, the source of the promised aid, and Gamilas, the invading empire, share a star system, with Gamilas dying and looking for a new home to colonize - and thus irradiating the Earth as a terraforming measure that coincidentally gets rid of those pesky barbarians crawling about on the surface. I can’t help but see Japan’s dual view of the outside world, and the US specifically, as invader and colonizer (hey, we still have a base on Okinawa), bringing death and destruction, but also hope and a new life.

Every crew member is important, from the impact of Okita’s declining health as captain to Kodai’s growth from a hotheaded youth into a capable commander and Okita’s successor to command. Nevertheless, the center of the show from the opening theme song is the ship.

In the end, I don’t know if before the Meiji restoration the Japanese had a culture of naming their ships and treating them like characters, but by World War 2, they certainly picked up the habit. And it has carried forward in their own science fiction as much as it has in ours.

I’m not sure of the original series is readily viewable without purchasing, but the first season I have watched of the recent reboot is worthwhile though I find it leans too heavily on the CGI

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