Remaking Yamato, Remaking Japan

Space Battleship Yamato and SF Anime

Baryon Tensor Posadas

Recent years have seen the development and production of several Hollywood remakes
of Japanese cultural commodities, among which are some based on sf Japanese
animations. Some of these remakes have provoked criticism from fan communities for
their ‘whitewashing’ of casts, settings and storylines. Given the hegemonic position that
Hollywood occupies within the world-media system, these criticisms are undoubtedly
warranted. Yet insofar as they operate on the basis of a politics of representation, they at
once run the risk of fetishising a notion of Japanese authenticity that re-inscribes mutually
reinforcing techno-orientalist and cultural nationalist undercurrents in the discourse
surrounding Japanese animation. My essay argues that rather than an approach that
privileges notions of originality and authenticity, the transnational cultural politics of
remakes and reboots can be more effectively apprehended when the intertextuality built
into the very structural logic of the sf genre is properly recognised. Taking up the recent
live-action remake of Space Battleship Yamato (2010) as an illustrative example, I suggest that
the nostalgic desire and staging of retroactive continuities that drive both its story and its
critical reception call attention to its repetitions of tropes from not only the preceding titles
from within the Yamato franchise, but also a longer legacy of nautical adventure stories
from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Informed by this textual genealogy,
I highlight the text’s engagement with the linkages between the history of imperialism and
the formation of sf as a genre in Japan and beyond.

Keywords: to be supplied

Introduction

One of the more salient developments within the anime industry in recent years
is the increasingly unmistakeable emergence of what can only be characterised
as a nostalgia movement marked by the proliferation of reboots and remakes
of classic sf anime series. The last two decades have seen the appearance of new
versions (in the form of both re-animations and live-action remakes) of such
classic titles as Astroboy (Tetsuwan Atomu; Japan 1959), Cyborg 009 (Saibōgu
009; Japan 1968), Space Pirate Captain Harlock (Uchūkaizokukyaputenhārokku;
Japan 1978–9) and even relatively more recent titles like Ghost in the Shell
(Kōkakukidōtai; Japan 1993), Neon Genesis Evangelion (Shinseikievangerion;

Science Fiction Film and Television 7.3 (2014), 315–42 ISSN 1754-3770 (print)  1754-3789 (online)
© Liverpool University Press doi:10.3828/sfftv.2014.19
316 Baryon Tensor Posadas

Japan 1995–6) and others. In addition, a number of examples of Hollywood

live-action remakes of anime titles, perhaps the most infamous of which are
Dragonball: Evolution (Wong US 2009) and Speed Racer (Wachowskis US 2008),
have also appeared. In part, this development is a product of the significant
investments made by the Japanese state to incorporate anime officially as
the central cultural commodity for export under the banner of ‘Cool Japan’.
As Kukhee Choo highlights, anime, manga, video games and other cultural
commodities had historically been viewed as vulgar and as such not given
official sanction in international campaigns for cultural promotion. However,
the decades of recession beginning in the 1990s forced a rethinking of these
notions, leading to a move to make popular culture a central component of the
Japanese government’s strategy for the international promotion of its contents
industry and national branding efforts (Choo 218).
A notable effect of this emergent trend is to reinforce an existing tendency
towards the fetishising of the category of anime itself into a coherent corpus of
canonical texts, with the concurrent impact of constructing anime as a form
of national culture, which, by implication, also has the effect of fetishising the
category of ‘the nation’ as an imagined entity, in both popular and scholarly
discourse. This has manifested, for example, in a marked shift in the dominant
approaches to the global circulation of anime. While a practice of extensive
translation and localisation to the extent of producing what were effectively
new versions of anime titles that efface the Japanese origins of their source
materials characterises the dominant modes of distribution of anime titles
outside of Japan during the 1970s and 1980s, by the 1990s, this was no longer
the case. Indeed, the appearance and widespread adoption of the very term
anime in the English language to signify animation from Japan specifically
and exclusively attests to precisely this development. One might even go so
far as to say that the transformation of anime from what used to be regarded
as a denationalised [mukokuseki] cultural commodity to something that is
emblematic of the national culture itself follows a pattern that aligns with
Stuart Hall’s observation of a shift towards a depoliticised embrace and
commodification of identity politics in the contemporary conjuncture in place
of earlier modes of racial exclusion (Hall 48).1
Not surprisingly, this emphasis on anime’s national origins produces a
host of problems, not the least of which is how the reduction of anime
to a national-cultural form forecloses the recognition of the transnational

1. The term mukokuseki literally translates to ‘without nationality’. Kōichi Iwabuchi offers
an excellent discussion of the various ways mukokuseki discourse has been used among media
commentators within Japan in his 2002 book Recentering Globalization (71–8).
 Remaking Yamato, Remaking Japan 317

dimensions of both its production and consumption. On the one hand, the
fan culture surrounding anime extends beyond Japan itself (a fact that has not
gone unnoticed by both producers and commentators of anime in Japan and
elsewhere), which paradoxically has served to reify precisely the habit of viewing
anime as media for the transmission of Japanese cultural values in line with
orientalist patterns of knowledge. On the other hand, the production of anime
is transnational in scale, often involving all manner of official international
co-productions and the farming out of the labour-intensive work of animation
itself to locations in Korea and China (LaMarre Anime Machine 89–90). Yet
all too often, discussions of anime place their focus primarily on a problem of
cultural hermeneutics, in effect overlooking how anime already exceeds the
nation. These problems only become more visible when focusing on sf anime
specifically. In the first place, while there are overlaps between sf and anime,
they are of course not reducible to one another. Crucially, whereas the very
term anime already marks its object of reference in terms of national origins, in
contrast, sf is not only a genre that cuts across national boundaries, but is one
that thematically poses the very problem of transnationality (Csicsery-Ronay,
‘Dis-Imagined’ 218). More to the point, it is the question of what exceeds allego-
risation that I would contend lies at the heart of the politics and potentialities
of sf. After all, the defining feature of the genre’s techniques of extrapolation
and speculation is the construction of entire alternate worlds that operate
under their own set of rules and internal logic. Or, as Carl Freedman once put
it, ‘the science fictional world is not only one different in time or place from our
own, but one whose chief interest is precisely the difference that such difference
makes’ (Freedman xvi). In other words, treating sf texts as repositories of
allegory offers only a weak account of how sf works qua sf. To emphasise this
aspect to the genre as the site of its political expression is to privilege precisely
what is not science-fictional about it.
In light of these issues, this essay examines the question of whether it would
not be more productive to approach the subject of remakes and reboots of
Japanese animation by shifting the focus from the anime side of the equation
to science-fictionality as the primary category of analysis. It suggests that the
primary significance of the various remakes and reboots of sf anime can be more
effectively located in their capacity to inform an approach that goes beyond
their extension of an allegorical commentary to foreground the structure of
inter-textuality built into the very mechanics of legibility undergirding the sf
genre. Even as the proliferation of remakes of sf anime are products of a national
branding strategy, in their performance of a nostalgic return to their source
texts, they also call attention to the doubled temporal logic at the heart of the
318 Baryon Tensor Posadas

sf’s textual practice, wherein the imagination of other worlds and futurities is
predicated on the citation of iconography from the history of the genre. I contend
that addressing this aspect of remakes brings attention to the historical roots
of the sf genre in colonial language and logic. In turn, I argue that attending
to the colonial underpinnings of sf can inform a critique of the discourse on
sf anime today, which often exhibits what Hajime Nakatani has called the
‘Japanological neurosis’ by treating anime as a self-evident and monolithic
entity subject primarily to national-allegorical hermeneutics (Nakatani 528). By
opening up a space to articulate a politics of sf anime beyond mere questions
of national-cultural allegory to one that addresses how allegorical readings
express precisely the ideological limits of the sf genre’s imaginative work of
worldbuilding, my approach suggests that if one is to complicate the purported
coherence of anime – and, for that matter, Japan – as objects of critical inquiry,
then it is imperative to treat sf anime as instantiations of what Istvan Csicsery-
Ronay has characterised as a condition of science-fictionality, that is, as a ‘mode
of response that frames and tests experiences as if they were aspects of a work
of science fiction’ (Seven Beauties 2).
In this effort, my discussion will focus on the sf anime series Space Battleship
Yamato (Uchūsenkan Yamato; Japan 1974–5). The series makes for a particularly
illustrative text for addressing these issues for a number of reasons. At the
level of its story, the undertones of nationalist nostalgia in its narrative already
readily invite approaches to the text primarily in the terms of national allegory.
This is only further emphasised at the level of its production history in that the
series has been subject to multiple sequels, reboots and remakes through the
past three decades, in effect placing it squarely in the middle of the burgeoning
anime nostalgia industry and the reconstitution of anime as a national-cultural
commodity.2 Indeed, it should not come as a surprise that much of the existing
scholarly writing on the series has focused precisely on the anime’s allegorical
reworking and remaking of the wartime icon of imperial Japan, namely, the

2. These titles include Uchūsenkan Yamato 2 (Space Battleship Yamato 2; Japan 1978) and
Uchūsenkan Yamato 3 (Space Battleship Yamato 3; Japan 1980) and their feature release versions
Saraba, uchūsenkan Yamato: ai no senshi-tachi (Farewell, Space Battleship Yamato: Soldiers of Love;
Leiji Matsumoto and Toshio Masuda, Japan 1978), Uchūsenkan Yamato, aratanarutabidach i (Space
Battleship Yamato: The New Voyage; Leiji Matsumoto, Japan 1979), Yamato yo towa ni (Be Forever
Yamato; Leiji Matsumoto and Toshio Masuda Japan 1980) and Uchūsenkan Yamato: Kanketsuhen
(Space Battleship Yamato: The Final Saga; Tomoharu Katsumata Japan 1983). More recent years
have also seen the release of a new feature length anime production Space Battleship Yamato:
Resurrection (Uchūsenkan Yamato: Fukkatsuhen; Yoshinobu Nishizaki Japan 2009), a live-action
feature film Space Battleship Yamato (Takashi Yamazaki Japan 2010) and the remake/reboot of the
original television series Space Battleship Yamato 2199 (Uchūsenkan Yamato 2199; Japan 2013).
 Remaking Yamato, Remaking Japan 319

imperial navy battleship Yamato, within the context of Cold-War-era Japan. In

this respect, it provides an instructive point of departure for the articulation of
a critique of these tendencies in the discursive space of sf anime today.

Space Battleship Yamato and Star Blazers

First broadcast in 1974, Space Battleship Yamato began its life as a 26-episode
television anime series whose story revolves around the crew of the titular ship
and their journey to the planet Iskandar. Set in the year 2199, the story opens
with the Earth already subject to interstellar aggression from the alien empire
Gamilus. Using radioactive asteroid bombs that they propel at high velocities
towards the Earth, the Gamilus attacks have rendered the planet’s surface
uninhabitable for human civilisation. With the space fleet all but destroyed
and the remaining population driven underground, Earth’s last hope for
survival lies with the Yamato and its young crew led by Captain Okita (Gorō
Naya) and the series’ primary protagonist Susumu Kodai (Kei Tomiyama).
The ship – rebuilt from the remains of the imperial Japanese navy battleship
from the Second World War and refitted with a ‘wave motion engine’ that
enables faster-than-light travel – must voyage to the planet Iskandar to retrieve
the ‘Cosmo-Cleaner D’, a device that can rid the planet of radiation before it
penetrates the Earth’s crust within one year’s time.
The subsequent episodes of the series detail the Yamato’s voyage to Iskandar
and back. Confronting numerous challenges ranging from the blockades and
constant threat of attacks by the Gamilus fleet, strange anomalies in space,
to their own dwindling supplies of food and resources, they journey beyond
the solar system and the Milky Way galaxy to the Large Magellanic Cloud
where Iskandar is located. The Yamato fights its way to its destination, only to
belatedly discover that Iskandar and Gamilus form a binary planetary system
that shares an orbit around the same star. Their approach to Iskandar therefore
brings them closer and closer to Gamilus as well. As the crew of the Yamato
faces off against the final assault of the Gamilus fleet, they learn that the
Gamilus home world is on the brink of destruction. Their attack on Earth was
motivated by their desire to terraform the planet into one similar to their own,
which is volcanic and laden with radiation. In the end though, the Yamato’s
final offensive destroys the volatile Gamilus world instead. In their efforts to
save the planet Earth, they end up consigning another planet to destruction.
From the above summary, it should not be difficult to see why much of the
existing scholarly commentary on Space Battleship Yamato emphasises the
320 Baryon Tensor Posadas

Space Battleship Yamato DVD Memorial Collection. Bandai Visual 2000. DVD.

nationalist flavour of its narrative. After all, all manner of historical allusions
are immediately apparent from even a cursory glance at the series. The most
obvious of these is the symbolic invocation of the image of the imperial
Japanese navy battleship Yamato. In fact, this reference is made explicit in
an extended sequence at the end of the second episode depicting the final
doomed mission of the battleship Yamato in the closing days of the Second
World War.3 Moreover, given that the name ‘Yamato’ also serves as an archaic
signifier for Japan itself, this gestures to not only the history of the Pacific War,
but also the very idea of the Japanese nation itself. Alongside this allusion is
the use of imagery that seemingly mirrors the firebombing of Tokyo and other

3.  This sequence was not without controversy even among the production staff. In his autobi-
ographical narrative of his days working as an animator, Ishiguro Noboru recounts how series
producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki and character designer, co-writer and co-director Leiji Matsumoto
clashed over the inclusion of the flashback scene given its right-wing nationalist overtones, with
Matsumuto going so far as to threaten to quit if they did not at least change the military march that
accompanied the scene in the soundtrack (Ishiguro).
 Remaking Yamato, Remaking Japan 321

cities, not to mention the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the
Gamilus radioactive asteroid bombs. A flashback sequence in the first episode,
following the first shot of a planet Earth turned red from nuclear radiation
and de-oceanification depicting the radioactive asteroid bombs vaporising the
planet’s cities with the distinctive mushroom cloud explosion upon impact,
only emphasises this connection. Finally, the oddly all-Japanese crew of its
titular ship (despite the ostensibly planetary scale of its story) engenders an
understanding of the conflict between the humans and the Gamilus as a race
war analogous to propaganda that proliferated in both Japan and the US during
the Second World War. In fact, while early episodes depicted the Gamilus as
appearing largely identical to humans, this was revised into their more familiar
blue-skinned look only midway through the original series, as if to bring to
the foreground the racial difference between humans and the Gamilus. That
the attack on Earth is genocidal in intent, and, for that matter, that the series
concludes with the effective end of the Gamilus race, only further punctuates
the point.
Suggestions therefore only seem apt that the series works as a restaging of
the Second World War with the battleship Yamato emerging victorious from
its final suicidal mission in response to the firebombing of Japanese cities.
While there are some differences in their specific interpretations, a common
thread that runs through much of the existing critical writing surrounding
the series is the shared premise of their approach that the question of
national history weaves through the narrative and through the world of
Space Battleship Yamato. For example, William Ashbaugh suggests that Space
Battleship Yamato tells a ‘traumatic war narrative’ that glorifies martial
spirit and re-inscribes both a ‘nobility of failure’ as well as a Japan-as-victim
discourse that aligns with post-war nationalist discourse in Japan (Ashbaugh
329). Ashbaugh’s account can be contrasted with Susan Napier’s take on the
series. In Napier’s view, the Yamato of the anime series explicitly distances itself
from its historical predecessor, presenting the ship as a symbol not of Japanese
nationalism, but of a more universal vision of a peaceful humanity. Hiromi
Mizuno offers a more nuanced account, albeit one that nonetheless remains
firmly in the mode of historical allegory. For Mizuno, Yamato represents a
historically-specific fantasy of post-war Japan to restage its war history in a
manner that resolves a contradiction between its pacifist constitution and
desire to reclaim a martial masculinity in the wake of the nation’s defeat in the
Second World War (Mizuno, ‘Pacifist Japan’ 105–12).
A question that arises here, though, is to what extent these critiques that
focus on the original Space Battleship Yamato can be extended to the various
322 Baryon Tensor Posadas

sequels, reboots and remakes of the franchise. Insofar as the various sequels or
remakes of Space Battleship Yamato often follow the template established by
the original series and repeat its plot points and character beats, an argument
can be made that the existing critical commentary can be extended to these
subsequent titles as well. After all, although the second series switches the
antagonists from the Gamilus to the Comet Empire and the third series
introduces a new foe in the Bolar, insofar as their plots follow the same
trajectory of placing the planet Earth under existential threat with the Yamato
going on a mission as the last hope of salvation, these changes do appear
to be largely cosmetic. What still remains is the basic narrative pattern of
re-enacting and reversing the final doomed mission of the historical battleship
Yamato in the last days of the war. Viewed in these terms, there is some merit
to apprehending these sequels and remakes of the Space Battleship Yamato as
expressions of the continued persistence of discourses that return to the site
of the post-war moment, to repeat and re-enact its logic so as to continue to
defer the ending of what has been called Japan’s ‘long post-war’ (Harootunian
113–14). They function, in other words, in the vein of Slavoj Żiżek’s conception
of nationalism as ‘the privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the
social field’, by restaging and rewriting history as a kind of fetishisation in the
interests of serving as a palliative against the foundational traumatic violence
of the formation of the post-war Japanese nation-state (Żiżek 202).
However, one particular iteration of the Space Battleship Yamato franchise –
namely the American redub of the series titled Star Blazers (US 1979–84 [AQ1])
– proves to be a problem. Star Blazers does not simply provide an English-
language translation of the series. Rather, it localises and domesticates the
series for an American audience. Character names are changed to ones without
any Japanese ethnic markers, such that series protagonist Susumu Kodai,
love interest Yuki Mori (Yōko Asagami) or ship’s captain Jūzo Okita become
Derek Wildstar (Kenneth Meseroll), Nova (Amy Howard Wilson) and Captain
Avatar (Gordon Ramsey), respectively. Other changes include efforts to tone
down the onscreen violence and implied sexual content and the removal of
references to alcohol. For example, dialogue suggesting that the Gamilus
soldiers encountered and killed by the crew of the Yamato are robots appears
in several episodes. Likewise, an extended sequence in the thirteenth episode
wherein Kodai attempts to kill a captured Gamilus soldier is revised to appear
more like a brawl than an act motivated by his desire to avenge the death of his
parents during the Gamilus bombardment. But perhaps the most significant
edit made is the renaming of the Yamato itself to Argo alongside the excision
of the above-mentioned sequence depicting the demise of the original Japanese
 Remaking Yamato, Remaking Japan 323

Space Battleship Yamato DVD Memorial Collection. Bandai Visual 2000. DVD.

imperial battleship Yamato from the second episode of the series. Taken all
together, the effect of these changes is to efface as many traces of the national
origins (and the relevant historical context) of its source text as possible.
In itself, this practice of localisation was not an altogether unusual
phenomenon. At the time, such efforts at localisation were a common practice
that can be seen in other popular releases, including Robotech (US 1985) or
Voltron: Defender of the Universe (US 1984–5).4 But what is interesting here
are not the changes introduced, but precisely the extent to which the narrative
of Space Battleship Yamato remains intact despite them. The narrative of Star
Blazers largely follows the same trajectory, and none of the changes made

4.  Voltron: Defender of the Universe was assembled from two unrelated anime series, namely Beast
King Golion (Hyakujū Ō Goraion; Japan 1981–82) and Armored Fleet Dairugger XV (Kikōkantai
Dairagā XV; Japan 1982–83). Similarly, Robotech put together three separate anime titles – Super
Dimension Fortress Macross (Chōjikū Yōsai Makurosu; Japan 1982–83), Super Dimension Cavalry
Southern Cross (Chōjikū Kidan Sazan Kurosu; Japan 1984), and Genesis Climber Mospeada
(KikōSōseiki Mosupīda; Japan 1983–84) – into a single coherent, multi-generational continuity.
324 Baryon Tensor Posadas

introduce any significant plot holes into the storyline. With this in mind, it
would therefore appear that, contrary to Mizuno’s claim that the persistence of
the image of the battleship Yamato in these texts suggests that ‘the historical
context is not simply ‘the background’ of the text but is a crucial aspect of
the text’(‘Pacifist Japan’ 121), the fact that the overarching plot of Star Blazers
does not diverge all that much from its source text despite the erasure of the
references to the history of Japan hints at the possibility that these historical
allusions may not be all that essential in the end.
Put simply, the very existence of Star Blazers suggests that the legibility
of the narrative of Space Battleship Yamato does not depend solely on a
familiarity with the history of Japan. Rather, it is also underwritten by a
knowledge of a different history altogether. Specifically, what facilitates the
capacity of the series to translate beyond national boundaries is its citation of
images from an extensive iconography accumulated through the past century
of the sf genre’s history, not just in Japan but elsewhere as well. Relevant
here is Damien Broderick’s observation that ‘the coding of each individual
SF text depends importantly on an unusually concentrated “encyclopaedia”
– mega-text of imaginary worlds, tropes, tools, lexicons, even grammatical
innovations borrowed from other textualities’ (Broderick xiii). Attempts to
represent or imagine a future in sf texts are therefore undergirded by the
deployment of sufficiently recognisable icons and images from the genre’s
past. After all, as with any codified genre, sf functions on the basis of an inter-
textual organisation of texts around a tension between producing something
that is recognisably familiar, on the one hand, and yet nevertheless offers a
variation on this familiarity. Thus, whether performed in implicit or explicit
terms, sf texts are never just about their ostensible subject matter (‘the
future’), but are at once also about the genre’s own history (‘the past’). They
necessarily incorporate a temporal movement at once forward and backward.
Consequently, insofar as the very act of remaking necessarily constitutes a
relation of difference and repetition, the restagings of the stories of the Yamato
series through the years speak to the doubled temporality built into the very
structural logic of the sf genre in a distilled form.
Such inter-textual references are in abundant evidence in the specific case
of Space Battleship Yamato. Indeed, the web of historical allusions noted
above point not only to the events of the Second World War, but also several
recognisable motifs made popular during the formative years of the sf genre.
For example, the initial premise of the series, wherein a much more powerful
alien race invade the Earth, cannot but recall the motif’s prototypical text,
H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1897), or, for that matter, all manner of
 Remaking Yamato, Remaking Japan 325

preceding future-war writings. The voyage to the distant stars undertaken by

the Yamato also connects the series to a range of other narratives that revolved
around the fantastic imaginary voyages of a solitary super vessel from a
heritage of pulp serials and nautical adventure stories from the early twentieth
century in Japan and elsewhere. Perhaps the most obvious example here is Jules
Verne’s Nautilus from 20000 Leagues under the Sea (1870 [AQ2]). There is also
the titular ‘floating castle’ of Ryūkei Yano’s Meiji era nautical adventure novel
Tale of Ukishiro (Ukishiromonogatari; 1890) or the various incarnations of the
flying submersible ram-equipped warship Gōtengō from Shunrō Oshikawa’s
future war series of novels beginning with Undersea Warship (Kaiteigunkan;
1899), alongside its subsequent film adaptation as Atragon (Kaiteigunkan;
Ishirō Honda Japan 1963).5 It is telling that when asked about the origins of
the idea of a battleship in space, Space Battleship Yamato producer Yoshinobu
Nishizaki’s response points not to Japanese history, but instead his childhood,
specifically the pre-war pulp sf stories of authors like Jūza Unno and Yōichirō
Minami, as the source of inspiration. Indeed, pre-production notes and
artwork reveal that the original plan for Space Battleship Yamato would involve
a more open-ended story about a converted asteroid serving as a colony ship in
search of a new home following the destruction of Earth. It is only later, once
mechanical and character designer Leiji Matsumoto joined the team, that the
idea of making the ship the rebuilt Yamato came along.
My point here is not to assert that the historical allusions in Space Battleship
Yamato have little importance. Rather, it is to highlight how these allusions
become meaningful only by way of their intermediation with the generic
formulae of sf narrative. In fact, what makes Yamato’s specific quotations from
the sf megatext noteworthy is precisely how they call attention to the colonial
underpinnings of the historical emergence of sf. After all, if alien invasion
narratives trace back their lineage to future war stories, then the former too
are linked to the historical backdrop of colonial wars’ inter-imperial rivalries
that were formative of the emergence of the latter. Similarly, the motif of the
imaginary voyage made popular through lost world and nautical adventure
narratives is wedded to a milieu marked by colonial projects of exploration
and exploitation of the frontier. In this respect, Yamato serves as an example
of John Rieder’s claim that ‘colonialism is a significant historical context for

5.  Robert Matthew provides a historical overview of pre-war Japanese sf in his Japanese Science
Fiction: A View of a Changing Society (5–37). Shizuka Inoue has also discussed the range of
influences and inter-textual sources of Space Battleship Yamato, specifically naming the work of
Robert Heinlein, the original Star Trek series (US 1966–1969), Japanese pre-war military sf and the
above mentioned Kaiteigunkan film adaptation (Inoue 44–59).
326 Baryon Tensor Posadas

early science fiction’ (2), that the legibility of sf narratives is predicated upon
the ideological and epistemological framework of a colonial cartography of the
world. As Rieder argues, not only do the central tropes and images of early
sf – exploration and the frontier, the encounter with alien cultures, eugenic
theories and racial discourses – derive from a colonial gaze, but also, the
appearance of a class of technocratic consumer-subjects who would constitute
the readership of sf required the concomitant development of an advanced
industrial economy organised around the commodification of leisure time,
which was itself a historical process dependent upon the exploitation of the
colonial periphery (Rieder 27–8). In other words, if sf texts operate on the
basis of establishing inter-textual links with the history of the genre, then it
should also be said that a crucial part of this history – this sf inter-text – is the
iconography of colonial discourse.6
Recognising the intermediation of the sf genre with colonial history allows for
the reframing of the discussion from the question of story to one of discourse. Sf
is not necessarily about colonialism at the level of manifest content, but rather,
the examination of the genre reveals the traces of the inscription of colonial
history at the level of its techniques of discursive articulation. In the case of the
Space Battleship Yamato series, one implication that can be drawn here, then, is
that while the manifest content of the narratives of Yamato and its subsequent
remakes may reference events specific to the history of post-war Japan, the
performance of the gesture itself derives much from the very structural impetus
of sf as a generic formation. Put another way, if the name ‘Yamato’ signals
towards the history of a specifically Japanese colonial empire, at another level,
the intertextual mechanisms of its narrative also exposes the colonial logic of
sf as such. While these certainly overlap, they are nonetheless not identical, a
point illustrated by the persistence of an undercurrent of tension between the
post-war pacifist desire expressed at the level of the story of Yamato and the
employment of colonial tropes and imagery in the very telling of this story,

6.  While Rieder does not discuss Japan specifically in his study, it arguably makes for a particularly
illustrative example of the genre’s complex intermediation with the history of colonialism, given its
doubled position as both subject and object of the colonial gaze. On the one hand, the development
of the sf genre in Japan (under the name kagakushōsetsu – literally ‘science fiction’) is inseparable
from what Hiromi Mizuno has characterised as an ideology of ‘scientific nationalism’ in midst of
its wartime mobilisation (Mizuno, Science 156–66). At the same time, Japan’s rise as an imperial
power prompted a ‘reorientation and reconsideration of Asia more broadly as a location from which
to mold futuristic representations and alternative temporalities’ (Sohn 5). It fuelled the populari-
sation of yellow peril fictions and future war narratives that would subsequently serve as one of the
crucial colonial foundations for the emergence of sf as a coherent literary genre not just in Japan but
elsewhere as well.
 Remaking Yamato, Remaking Japan 327

Space Battleship Yamato DVD Memorial Collection. Bandai Visual 2000. DVD.

which manifests itself in the contestations around the interpretation of the

politics of the series. Indeed, this tension rises to the surface of the story of
Space Battleship Yamato at a number of points, most notably at the end of the
series when the Yamato destroys the home world of the Gamilus. Standing amid
the ashes and rubbles, Kodai and Mori Yuki lament the destruction they have
caused. ‘In order to save the Earth, we have just ravaged another world’, Kodai
mutters in tears. ‘Victory tastes like ashes’. Yet, the sentiment rings hollow in
the end. Even as the characters appear to express an anti-war sentiment, it turns
out that it is only the story of a future war – and a genocidal war at that – that
the series is able to present. The colonial conventions of the genre it employs
preclude any other narrative trajectory.
Consequently, the pertinent question to pose of the Yamato series as far as the
problem of the politics of sf is concerned is not whether it adopts a nationalist
or critical stance vis-à-vis the history of Japanese colonial expansion. Rather,
it is how, regardless of the content of its political expression, its employment
of the language and iconography of coloniality already sets the terms for what
328 Baryon Tensor Posadas

imaginary worlds and futures it can offer in the first place. Indeed, this is of
particular significance given the fact that Space Battleship Yamato is not a
text that comes into being at the moment of the sf genre’s emergence. It thus
raises the question of how the colonial lineage of sf is determinative of the
limits of what narratives can be imagined within the genre’s constraints in
the post-colonial world as well, that is, even after the historical end of formal
colonial structures. The formal end of colonial rule does not necessarily lead
to the ending of the employment of colonial tropes in sf narratives. After all,
genres like sf develop with their own temporal tendencies that intersect, but
need not be identical to the actual unfolding of history. As such, they bring to
the foreground what Naoki Sakai has described as ‘the ongoing existence of this
history of colonialism that is precisely the postcolonial’ (295). By transposing a
narrative from one cultural sphere to another (as is the case with Star Blazers)
or from one historical moment to another (as is the case with the remakes of
the series that have appeared in more recent years), I believe that Yamato and
its remakes highlight precisely such questions vis-à-vis the politics of sf in the
present moment.

Colonial cognitive estrangement

One of the crucial ways the impact of the sf genre’s colonial heritage for its
politics in the present makes itself manifest is through a staging of an interplay
between the simultaneous evocation of a sense of wonder in the promise of
fantastic worlds and a set of familiar colonial images to serve as signposts to
orient oneself within the otherness of the imagined world of the text. Or, to
build upon Darko Suvin’s pioneering theorisation of the genre, if sf operates
on the basis of a mechanism of ‘cognitive estrangement’ (Suvin 4), then it is
necessary to account for how coloniality – understood not only as a historical
period that is now over, but as a set of social technologies that form [AQ3]
the production of a legible difference – works as one of the mechanisms
through which the cognition effect is generated. In other words, sf operates on a
principle of colonial cognitive estrangement. The employment of colonial codes
as allegorical devices or metaphors – ideologies of progress, space colonisation,
the exploration of the frontier, the discovery of lost worlds or the encounter
with alien cultures – is an important device for making sense out of the alterity
of a given sf world.
Attending to one particular set of images drawn from the genre’s megatext
that occupies a central position in the various incarnations of the Space
 Remaking Yamato, Remaking Japan 329

Battleship Yamato series – namely, the narrative formula of distant voyages

across the stars – is instructive here. While much of the series revolves around
the Yamato’s various hostile encounters with the Gamilus fleet as they make
their way towards Iskandar, several episodes focus on the long voyage itself,
detailing scenes wherein the crew attempt to navigate through various natural
hazards of intergalactic space. For example, in one episode, during a scene
wherein the crew receive a briefing on the progress of their journey from Earth
towards the Large Magellanic Cloud against a backdrop of a screen displaying
an intergalactic map, the ship’s navigator and helmsman Daisuke Shima
(Shūsei Nakamura) discusses methods of passing through the gaseous storms
of a planetary cluster. Another episode has the ship trapped within a subspace
vortex that serves as a kind of Sargasso Sea in space. These moments in the
series have the effect of foregrounding its lineage to nautical adventure stories
of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that presaged the subsequent
consolidation of sf as a formalised genre.
The employment of a cartographic gaze was a common feature of these
adventure narratives. Famously, Jules Verne drafted all manner of maps – real
and imagined – to accompany his various fictions. Indeed, the spatial imaginary
at the heart of his writing is itself arguably cartographic in character (Harpold
19–20). This cartographic gaze in Verne is just one manifestation of the broader
emergence of what Mary Louise Pratt has termed a ‘planetary consciousness’
that would transform the understanding of the world into a singular spatial
totality that cannot but be viewed against the backdrop of colonial expansion
(15). One impact of the scalar shift in conceptions of spatiality that cartographic
technologies enable is paradoxically to render the totality of the lived experience
of the everyday ungraspable or unrepresentable. As Fredric Jameson once
noted, ‘colonialism means that a significant structural segment of the economic
system as a whole is now located elsewhere.... Such spatial disjunction has as its
immediate consequence the inability to grasp the way the system functions as
a whole’ (50–1). In this context, the cartographic imagination also functions in
response to the very sense of crisis it itself provokes by offering the fantasy of a
stable frame of reference for navigation and representation. It operates, as Anne
McClintock has succinctly put it, as a ‘technology of possession, promising that
those with the capacity to make such perfect representations must also have
the right of territorial control’ while at once serving as ‘vivid reminders of the
failure of knowledge and hence the tenuousness of possession’ by also marking
its blank spaces, its threshold and marginal zones (28).
Space Battleship Yamato and other subsequent sf texts of a similar space
operatic vein appear imaginatively to extend onto a galactic scale these
330 Baryon Tensor Posadas

same techniques of conceiving and making legible a spatial imaginary made

possible by technologies of cartography that were products – and for that
matter, productive – of colonial fields of knowledge production. It is no mere
coincidence that the series appeared precisely at another moment of renewed
reconfigurations in the global spatial imaginary, marking the moment of
passage into a new regime of flexible accumulation that triggered a new round
of intensified time-space compression. This manifested in such forms as the
acceleration of production processes by way of techniques of small-batch
production, as well as improvements in media communication and information
technologies which in turn also enabled a spatial compression in the form of a
transnational dissemination of sites of production and consumption (Harvey
147). Echoing the earlier emergence of the sf genre under analogous historical
circumstances, these material transformations not only formed the backdrop
that shaped the emergence of sf anime, but in turn, the very narratives about
them – whether they go by the name of neoliberalism, late capitalism, postmo-
dernity or globalisation – also often made use of the language of sf. As Istvan
Csicsery-Ronay has argued, these discourses often derived their coherence
and intelligibility from homologies with the narratives and tropes that have
entered the popular consciousness through the genre of sf. In other words, they
partook in the genre’s megatext, such that sf concepts and concerns inflected
the language of history and theory pertaining to the conditions of the contem-
porary conjuncture. For Csicsery-Ronay, an important social function of sf
is the mediation of the shift in the cognitive map from a national to a global
culture at the level of the collective imagination. In other words, the genre
emerged at the moment when the spatial imagination exceeds the boundaries
of the nation-state, thus demanding a literature that could mediate and manage
this transition (‘Empire’ 232).
Csicsery-Ronay’s claim here can easily be extended to the language of new
media theories as well. An important consideration here is the fact that the
emergence of anime in Japan is inseparable from the rise of new modes of
decentred media-commodity production such as character merchandising,
tie-in advertising and fan cultural practice. Indeed, anime may very well be the
single best example of the emergent network assemblage of transnational and
transmedia flows and interactions. In this sense, anime is not reducible to a
style or aesthetic of cartooning that later becomes a transmedia practice; on the
contrary, it was already transmedia at its very origins by virtue of the material
circumstances of its development. Not surprisingly then, much of the critical
discourse surrounding anime treats it as a media phenomenon characteristic of
the condition of postmodernity. On this point, Thomas LaMarre has observed
 Remaking Yamato, Remaking Japan 331

that the conventional understanding among theorists of anime is that the

distinctive feature of anime aesthetics and media practice is its employment of
what might be termed a distributive visual function that operates on multiple
dimensions. On one level, whereas the traditional filmic image operates on the
principle of valorising the illusion of depth, the construction of perspective and
the placement of the spectator in a transcendental subject position, with anime,
the flat aesthetics generate a practice of spectatorship that revolves around
a non-hierarchised visual field based on a breakdown in the visual field’s
organisation of foreground and background, centre and periphery. At the same
time, this breakdown in visual hierarchies generates a parallel procedure at
work at the level of production. This entails an analogous breakdown in the
hierarchies of producers. Fans valorise not a single auteur, but provide as much
attention to character and mechanical designers as they do to writers and
directors. However, LaMarre also points out that this valorisation of anime’s
distributive field breaks down at the level of history and geopolitics. Analyses
of anime typically read its visual and cultural practices as something culturally
other, as a national-cultural idiosyncrasy that subscribes a conception of the
world based on a binary between Western modernity and an always-already
postmodern Japan. Thus, if anime’s visual practices present a challenge to
modern modes of visuality and subjectivity, this potential ends up being
recuperated by a colonial gaze that reconstitutes anime as a national-cultural
object (LaMarre, ‘Otaku’ 366–7).
Obviously, the categories of sf and anime are not reducible to one another.
That said, they nonetheless present substantial overlaps not just in textual
terms, but also in their respective communities of consumption. It is of no small
significance that many of the keys texts most often identified as occupying a
central position in the history of anime – Astro Boy (Astro Boy tetsuwanatomu;
Japan 2003–4), Mobile Suit Gundam (Kidôsenshi Gandamu; Japan 1979–80),
Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo Japan 1988), Ghost in the Shell (Kôkaku Kidôtai;
Mamori Oshii Japan 1995), and The Girl Who Leapt through Time (Toki o
kakerushôjo; Mamoru Hosoda Japan 2006), for example – are sf texts. Indeed,
one might go so far as to assert that sf anime implicitly forms the primary basis
for the critical understanding of the anime more generally, given that these
texts became the basis for much of the theorisation of its cultural and visual
practices. Beyond this, insofar as sf anime performs the retroactive consti-
tution of the anime text as a national-cultural object out of its transmedia and
transnational dimensions, it effectively reinscribes the procedure of colonial
cognitive estrangement. The question of the science-fictionality of sf anime
therefore involves not just the narratives of texts subsumed under its name, but
332 Baryon Tensor Posadas

more importantly, how the very category itself performs the ideological work
of sf. My contention, then, is that it is precisely this ideological work – that is,
the engagement with the problem of transnationality by providing a language
and cultural iconography drawn from an earlier colonial gaze to mediate the
encounter with difference – that underwrites the recent proliferation of anime
remakes and reboots.

Retroactive continuities

Viewed in this light, what is significant about the Space Battleship Yamato
series (and all its subsequent sequels, remakes and other iterations) is how it
neatly captures these dynamics of sf anime, thus providing a point of reference
for articulating their larger stakes. On the one hand, the series prefigures and
prepares the ground for precisely the emergence of anime as a transmedia
cultural practice.7 On the other hand, its recent remakes and reboots call
attention to the construction of anime as a national-cultural object with its
own corpus of canonical texts. Illustrative here is the production history
of the series, which not only serves as an important context for examining
the various revivals, reboots and remakes of the Yamato franchise that have
since appeared, but also serves as a prototype for the patterns of production
and consumption of sf anime more generally. Although it is widely regarded
as a seminal series in the history of anime today, Yamato was not initially a
ratings success on its first airing on Yomiuri television. Indeed, its ratings
were sufficiently disappointing that its run had to be shortened from the
initial plan of 39-episodes to a 26-episode order to cut losses. Popular triumph
for the series only came two years later in 1977, with the wildly successful
theatrical release of a feature-length edit of the series, which garnered media
coverage of the line-ups that formed around theatres overnight prior to its
official premiere. What accounts for this change of fortunes (and subsequent
flourishing of iterations and variations of the broader Yamato franchise) was
producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki’s employment of strategies that anticipate
the kinds of participatory cultural practice and media-mix techniques that
several critics have identified as a characteristic feature of contemporary

7.  Hideaki Anno, creator of the wildly popular Neon Genesis Evangelion and co-founder (with
Okada Toshio and others) of Studio Gainax, identifies Yamato as the series that sparked his
interest in producing animation. Furthermore, he contends that Yamato was instrumental in the
development of anime fan culture itself (Anno and Nishizaki 52–5). Takashi Murakami has also
expressed a similar sentiment in his Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (70).
 Remaking Yamato, Remaking Japan 333

anime production and consumption. As producer Nishizaki himself revealed

in various interviews, these included the mobilisation of the various Yamato
fan clubs that arose in the past years as Yamato aired in reruns, as well as a
guerrilla marketing and promotional campaign that involved tie-in merchan-
dising (an animation cel from the series was offered to viewers on the first day)
as well as a preview release of an English-dubbed version at the 1997 Cannes
Film Festival (Nishizaki and Kuroi 129–35).
In an observation that parallels the work of Henry Jenkins on the centrality
of worldbuilding as a strategy of transmedia culture (Jenkins 114), Eiji Ōtsuka
suggests that a characteristic feature of the consumption of contemporary
anime and its surrounding commodities is its organisation around a principle
of serialisation without a fixed point of origin. Audiences of anime attempt
to apprehend the totality of a narrative world through their instantiation in a
multiplicity of narrative fragments across media forms. Each episode, each text
does not exist in isolation as a coherent narrative in itself, but instead functions
as an iteration that offers an access point to a larger grand-narrative that he
calls ‘a worldview’ [sekaikan] that exists in the background, unified through
the recognition of consistent character images and designs, thus shifting the
emphasis of consumption from narratives to worlds, with specific characters
as nodal points for apprehending these expansive and immersive fictional
universes. Or, in the words of Ōtsuka, ‘the official drama of a concrete single
episode or single series of anime program becomes merely the extraction
of a series of events that occurred during a specified period around a single
individual arbitrarily chosen to be the central character from within this large
world’ (108).
One important implication of Ōtsuka’s analysis, as far as the problem of
approaching remakes is concerned, is the relative devaluation of the notion of
origins under the model of narrative consumption that he proposes. Because the
object of consumption is the totality of the world of the series itself, even ostensibly
‘original’ texts are remade into just another iteration that does not warrant any
special privileging. Consequently, approaching subsequent iterations in terms
of the typical treatment of remakes that would simply compare them to their
putative source materials cannot but miss the point. Whether one concludes
that they are little more than ‘copies that are derivative, formulaic, and lacking
in creativity or artistic inspiration’, or serve as ‘an opportunity to revisit classic
film texts and, whether for pure pleasure or economic gain, to reimagine them
in new ways’ (1), [AQ4] as Scott A. Lukas and John Marmysz have charac-
terised the two poles of the cultural discourse surrounding remakes, there
remains the presupposition that there is a fixed original to serve as a baseline
334 Baryon Tensor Posadas

for comparison in the first place. Instead, the putative original text must be
understood as simply another necessarily partial instantiation of the world of
the series, itself subject to revision and transformation.
Such is indeed the case with the multiple iterations that the Yamato narrative
has taken through the past decades. Not only has every additional title
expanded the world of the series, but in doing so, they have also introduced
several continuity errors that subsequently required various reboots and
retroactive continuities (or ret-cons). Characters that die in one series turn up
alive in another. While one version of the story may end with the destruction
of the ship, another version may have it survive through a deus ex machina. In
one case, even the years in which events take place contradict one another. This
highlights the untenability of fixing a canonical point of origin for the series,
both at the level of the story and the production history of the series. Given
this context, the move of the more recent versions of the series to reboot the
continuity altogether and remake the story from the beginning make sense.
Indeed, many of the changes these more recent iterations of the Yamato series
make to the story not only call attention to these contradictions in the series
continuity but, moreover, actively attempt to explain or resolve them.
Consider, for instance, Space Battleship Yamato 2199, a new 26-episode series
that revisits the story of the original series with modern animation techniques
and higher production values. While Yamato 2199 largely follows the voyage
to Iskandar plotline of the original 1974–5 series, inevitably, as remakes go,
it also introduces several changes in the story, including the addition of new
characters, the re-imagining of the Yamato’s most famous battles and the
incorporation of plot points from later seasons of the original series. The
most noteworthy changes though directly address and attempt to explain
oddities and errors in the Yamato continuity. For instance, the coincidental
similarity in the appearance of Yuki Mori and Starsha (the queen of Iskandar),
while originally little more than a product of a quirk in Leiji Matsumoto’s
character designs, is turned into a plot point with the crew of the Yamato
openly expressing suspicion that Yuki Mori is secretly an Iskandarian agent
and various other characters mistaking her for one of Starsha’s sisters. Another
case involves the aforementioned retcon of the skin colour of the Gamilus from
their original human-like appearance to blue-skinned humanoid aliens. In
the Yamato 2199 version, the human-like Gamilus are members of conquered
and colonised races incorporated as second-class citizens within the Gamilus
Empire. As such, their appearance in the earlier episodes is indicative of
the backwater status of Earth in the eyes of the Gamilus, not worthy of the
attention of its highest-ranked commanders.
 Remaking Yamato, Remaking Japan 335

Space Battleship Yamato 2199 2. Bandai Visual, 2012. DVD.

A similar pattern of changes appears in the 2010 live-action feature-length

remake Space Battleship Yamato. Like Yamato 2199, the live action remake
revises the representation of the Gamilus, albeit taking it in a wholly different
direction. Instead of their traditional appearance as blue-skinned humanoid
aliens in the anime series, they take the form of incorporeal energy beings that
must possess human bodies in order to communicate with the protagonists in
the live-action remake. In addition, the live-action remake’s conclusion, with
protagonist Susumu Kodai (Takuya Kimura) commanding the Yamato into
a last-ditch suicidal attack against an enemy warship to save the Earth, also
differs from the ending of the original series. It is, however, almost completely
identical to the ending of the second theatrical feature Farewell, Space
Battleship Yamato: Soldiers of Love, even to the point of mirroring several
iconic shots such as the crew saluting the Yamato from their escape shuttles
and Kodai seeing the ghosts of the dead crew members as he commands the
ship into its final suicide run. But what makes this echo noteworthy is the
fact that the ending of Farewell, Space Battleship Yamato was one that had
to be erased from the canonical narrative continuity when the subsequent
second season of the television anime series retold its story in extended form.
Because of fan backlash against the conclusion of the feature-length version,
the television series offered a new ending wherein the Yamato survives the
attack.
336 Baryon Tensor Posadas

Space Battleship Yamato. TCEntertainment 2011. DVD.

An interesting contrast between these two remakes appears here. Whereas

the reworking of the story in Yamato 2199 appears to reinforce the allegorical
dimensions and post-war political commentary found in the original series, the
live-action remake downplays them. Their respective approaches to retconning
the Gamilus presents the most striking evidence of this divergence. At several
points, Yamato 2199 emphasises the shared humanity of all the races that
appear in the series, with moments depicting Gamilus generals communicating
with their families in the midst of the war, or, most notably, in the scene with
the crew of the Yamato exclaiming that the Gamilus are just like them when
they first meet a Gamilus soldier face to face. Although there is some gesture
towards the issue of war responsibility, with the revelation midway through
the series that it was the Earth space fleet that fired the first shot to provoke
the outbreak of war with the Gamilus empire, overall, the treatment of war in
Yamato 2199 could still be criticised for a kind of ideological recuperation of
Japanese war history in line with the politics of the original series. Nonetheless,
it stands in marked contrast to the approach of the live-action series, which
renders the Gamilus as a malevolent and literally inhuman force, to the extent
that their destruction by the end of the film does not even warrant a second
thought. The move appears, though, to be less an overt political gesture about
war per se as much as an attempt to strip the live-action film of as many traces
of direct political content as possible, and instead to present straightforward,
self-contained sf action adventure.
Yet despite this effort to denationalise at the level of its story, ultimately, what
is interesting about the live-action remake of Yamato is how it nonetheless
reinscribes nationality through the way its formal devices establish its
 Remaking Yamato, Remaking Japan 337

Space Battleship Yamato. TCEntertainment 2011.

relationship to its source text. Of particular significance here is how, even as

it takes as its point of departure anime’s enactment of a breakdown of origins,
the film nevertheless responds by consistently and at multiple levels expressing
a nostalgic desire to turn away from the anime’s transmedia potential to return
to origins. To begin with, there is of course the literal return to the cinematic
image implied in the very act of making a live-action remake in the first
place. Contrary to Lev Manovich’s claim that cinema would increasingly be
subsumed into a subset of animation (302), what the remakes of Yamato and
other titles suggest is that this is only true insofar as this animation can be
subsumed into the visual logic of cinematism organised around mobility and
depth of field. In addition, there is also the matter of the production history
of Yamato and its subsequent remakes. At the onset, two names were closely
associated with the making of series: Yoshinobu Nishizaki, who originated the
story, and Leiji Matsumoto, who is credited with creating the iconic character
and mechanical designs of the series. However, a falling out between the two
led to a decade-long legal battle over the ownership of the copyright for the
franchise, during which time the production of further Yamato series was
difficult. It was not until the copyright was awarded to Nishizaki (albeit with
the original character designs excluded) that new titles could be made without
legal challenge. In effect, the making of the film was predicated precisely upon
a re-hierarchisation of production.
Given all this, is it any surprise that the overarching principle around
which the live-action film works seems to be the generation of nostalgic
effect? Of course, a large part of this undercurrent of nostalgia runs through
much of the source material that constitutes the Yamato multiverse. That
338 Baryon Tensor Posadas

said, the difference in the frequencies and durations of spectatorship produce

significantly different effects on the respective viewers of these texts, with
the consequence of heightening the nostalgic dimensions of the story of
Yamato in the live-action remake. On the one hand, the serialised format
of the television anime is organised around a sense of anticipation, a sense
that is further punctuated by the countdown clock that appears at the end
of each episode marking down the number of days until the destruction of
the Earth. On the other hand, the compressed time of the live-action film
follows a narrative logic founded upon the spectator’s nostalgic recognition
of a sequence of set-pieces that invoke famous moments from the original
series, from the first launch of the Yamato, to the firing of the wave motion
gun, to the warp drive test, to the arrival at twin planets of Iskandar and
Gamilus and the eventual return to Earth. In other words, it rejects conven-
tional narrative in favour of a nostalgic recognition, thus effectively rendering
the plot difficult to follow unless the spectator already possessed an existing
familiarity with the series.
One implication that can be drawn from the way the live-action remake of
Space Battleship Yamato appears to imagine its supposed spectator is that the
film works under the premise that such spectators are not a niche market. In
other words, it presupposes a context wherein the Yamato series occupies a
canonical status within a corpus of texts subsumed under the name of sf anime,
a context wherein sf anime has increasingly established itself as a representative
of Japanese national culture. Consequently, even as the live-action remake
ostensibly strips the series of its more overt allegorical allusions to Japanese
national history, the nation nevertheless returns at another level, at the
level of the formation of a community of consumption organised around
the nation as an object of cultural hermeneutics. In this sense, the nostalgic
drive that powers the popularity of the Yamato series is symptomatic of the
desire to recreate a familiar sense of (national) place out of the uncertainties
of the contemporary conjuncture embedded within the burgeoning nostalgia
industry of sf anime. It is for this reason that I believe that the politics of sf
anime are not reducible to a matter of allegorical commentary, but are instead
more productively apprehended in the mechanisms of science-fictionality, in
its employment of colonial cognitive estrangement as a discursive device that
generates nationality, that constructs ‘Japan’ itself as an effect of sf intertex-
tuality. Sf anime enacts a remaking of the colonial gaze that exposes how the
work of sf is perhaps less about the imagination of the future per se, and more
the cataloguing of the ideological limits that shape what futures are imaginable
at particular historical conjunctures.
 Remaking Yamato, Remaking Japan 339

Remakes and techno-orientalism

To bring this discussion to a close, let me turn to one last remake of the
Yamato series, one that is yet to exist, while nevertheless speaking to the
issue of the relations between Japan, science-fictionality and anime. Earlier,
I mentioned the multiple Hollywood live-action remakes of anime titles that
have appeared in recent years as a part of an organised effort to market
Japanese cultural products as export products around the world. Interestingly
enough, there is now some talk of plans to make an American live-action
remake based not upon Space Battleship Yamato but upon its American
counterpart Star Blazers.8 No doubt, this remake – if it ever comes into being
– will be the subject of some controversy, as many other such Hollywood
remakes of anime have been. In particular, a point of contention that often
arises with such remakes has been the casting choices, which typically feature
a largely (if not completely) white cast, characterised as a ‘white-washing’ of
the original Japanese characters.
Much of this criticism vis-a-vis Hollywood’s remaking of anime titles is
warranted, especially given Hollywood’s long history of problematic represen-
tations of people of colour coupled with practices like yellowface performance.
However, these criticisms are not themselves without problems, perhaps
the most obvious of which is their tendency to naively privilege a notion
of originality. In itself, this is not unusual. Many critics have noted that
one consequence of the commercial hegemony of Hollywood within the
world-media system is the tendency to treat the production of American
remakes as little more than a parasitical commercial venture. But what is
interesting in the case of the commentary surrounding anime in particular is
an all too common slippage between the privileging of textual originality and
the fetishising of cultural originality or authenticity, often operating through a
rhetorical stance that implicitly asserts a fundamental link between ‘Japan’ and
the science-fictionality of the texts in question.
However, this rhetorical stance takes as its implied premise the long-standing
problem of the circulation of iconographies and discourses that often evoke a
perception of a close linkage between the imagination of ‘Japan’ and visions
of high-tech futures that David Morley and Kevin Robbins first concep-
tualised (147), later picked up by theorists of anime like Toshiya Ueno. For

8.  Skydance Productions originally acquired the rights to the Yamato franchise in 2011. As of 2013,
reports indicate that Christopher McQuarrie has been asked to write and direct a Star Blazers
remake. In a parallel development, Space Battleship Yamato 2199 is also currently being redubbed
into English as Star Blazers 2199.
340 Baryon Tensor Posadas

Ueno, techno-orientalism works as a kind of image machine that facilitates

the traffic between mutually narcissistic gazes. It is ‘through this mirror
stage and its cultural apparatus that Western or other people misunderstand
and fail to recognise an always illusory Japanese culture, but it is also the
mechanism through which Japanese people misrecognise themselves’ (Ueno
228–9). Analogous to how an earlier model of historical orientalism played
a role in the management of colonial difference, techno-orientalism renders
the disorienting alterity of the condition of science-fictionality legible by
melding it with a paradoxically familiar cultural exoticism. In the words of
Wendy Chun, techno-orientalism ‘seeks to orient the reader to a technology-
oriented present/future … through the promise of a readable difference, and
through a conflation of information networks with an exotic urban landscape’
(177). Constructions of ‘Japan’ under this framework therefore provide an
illustrative example of how the operations of a colonial gaze at the heart of
the worldbuilding techniques of sf extend beyond the formally designated
boundaries of the genre to speak to a broader condition of science-fictionality.
Attending to the mechanisms of this science-fictionality of sf anime in its
discursive articulation of ‘Japan’ opens up a space to account for how these
discursive articulations are embedded within broader historical transfor-
mations taking place on a global scale, without misreading them as little
more than matters of cultural difference. This point is especially crucial given
that one of the most pressing problems that marks the condition of science-
fictionality of the contemporary conjuncture is paradoxically the loss of a sense
of historicity and futurity, that is, the very inability to imagine a radically
different future that is not already determined in advance by colonised habits
of thought. With this in mind, let me end then by returning to the Yamato
series. I believe that it is no mere coincidence that the original 1974 series
and the 2010 live-action remake respectively appear at two moments of crises
and austerity that bookend the history of what has since come to be called
globalisation. The significance of the recent live-action remake, then, is more
productively located not by its divergences from the original series, but by
precisely the extent of its fidelity to it. It seems to suggest that even after
over thirty years, at a time of another crisis arising out of the limits of the
neoliberal model of globalisation that should properly mark its end, there still
persists a crisis of futurity. There still persists an inability to imagine an after
to the conditions of the present.
 Remaking Yamato, Remaking Japan 341
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