Reddit reviews Requiem for Battleship Yamato (Bluejacket Books)

We can go more pedantic!

Up until WWII, katakana/hiragana standards were sort of a mess. Hiragana was the "standard" syllabary for formal purposes, but katakana was considered easier to write and read. This possibly a legacy from when hiragana was more complex and had more strokes per character than katakana.

So katakana was used for notes, some official purposes (e.g. military orders, or meetings from a town hall meeting), various kinds of "officialese," and a lot of kid-oriented literature. So the book Requiem for Yamato (an account of the sinking of the battleship Yamato during the battle of Okinawa) is written in a mix of katakana and kanji, to evoke how military reports were written at the time. This wartime kids' balloon is written mostly in katakana, because it was aimed at kids. If you look at kids' textbooks from the 1870-1940 period (which I'm too lazy to google right now) you'll see a lot of katakana in them.

Foreign words were sometimes written in katakana (which makes sense from the above uses; it could communicate "here is a hard to pronounce word, I shall write it in katakana to spare your brain" or "here is an official, important scientific (tm) word, which I shall emphasize by writing it in katakana"), but not always.

But katakana was also thrown in willy-nilly in a lot of situations for random aesthetic reasons, sort of like all-caps in English today. Go look around at some English signs and labels, and try to come up with a coherent standard from when something is all caps, when it's all lower case, and when it's a mix; good luck!

After WWII, the Japanese government reformed the language's orthography, and there was a mostly-successful attempt to bring order to the katakana chaos. It was then that the "foreign words get written in katakana" became official. This applied to all foreign words, by the way, not just English.

Scientific and technical terms also got written in katakana. Partly this was probably a legacy of "officialese," partly it's because a lot of them are loan words. It's also because a lot of the words that do have kanji spellings use super obscure kanji, and it's important to be able to read an intro to biology textbook without having a PhD in etymology.

Everyday names of plants and animals (even if they're not scientific names) get written in katakana for the same reason.

Finally there's emphasis. Katakana was also used for emphasis pre-WWII, but it was dialed way, way back after the spelling reform. There's just a lot less use of katakana for emphasis in post-WWII writing. Partly this might have been simply a change in style, similar to how in English writers like H.P. Lovecraft might put the entire final sentence or even paragraph of their extremely verbose horror story in italic!!! but this would be considered old fashioned and melodramatic by a writer in the 60's. But it also might have been a formal change in standards, I'm not sure.

The "katakana is kid-friendly" thing completely disappeared, so far as I can tell.

Katakana in labelling and signage, though, remains a chaotic mess that defies anything resembling order or logic. So that tradition remained intact.

Excerpt from Ensign Yoshida Mitsuru's account of the battle's opening phase:

>1220 hours: our air search radar picks up three blips, each apparently a large formation.

> In his usual guttural voice Petty Officer Hasegawa, chief of the antiaircraft radar room, gives a running commentary on their range and bearing. “Contacts. Three large formations. Approaching.”

> Once the P.A. passes on word of the approaching planes, the ship, quiet already, becomes quieter still. As the radar tracks the blips, the data is transmitted to us moment by moment over the voice tube: … range 30,000 meters, bearing 160 degrees … second raid, range 25,000 meters, bearing 85 degrees…

> How many times, in target practice, have we conducted such tracking? I am possessed by the illusion that we have already experienced searches under the same conditions, with the same battle positions, even with the same mood.

> The blips are not an imagined enemy but an enemy poised for the kill. The location: not our training waters, but hostile waters.

> A large squadron appears out of a gap in the clouds.

> “More than one hundred enemy planes attacking!” Is it the navigation officer who calls this out?

> Inevitable that both torpedoes and bombs will focus on Yamato. The captain orders: “Commence firing.”

> Twenty-four antiaircraft guns and 120 machine guns open fire at the same moment. The main guns of the escort destroyers, too, flash in unison. The battle begins.

> The tracks of the torpedoes are a beautiful white against the water, as if someone were drawing a needle through the water; they come pressing in, aimed at Yamato from a dozen different directions and intersecting silently. Estimating by sight their distance and angle on the plotting board, we shift course to run parallel to the torpedoes and barely succeed in dodging them.

> Opening her engines with their 150,000 horsepower to full throttle, straining at her top battle speed of twenty-seven knots, and turning her rudders hard to either side, Yamato continues her desperate evasive maneuvers...

After sustaining more than a dozen hits from torpedoes and bombs, Yamato's ammunition magazine exploded. The sight and sound of the blast could be seen as far as 100 miles away.

If you are into IJN operations I can't recommend Requiem for Battleship Yamato by Yoshida Mitsuru enough.

A great book on this is, "Requiem for Battleship Yamato" by one of the survivors, an officer on the bridge. https://www.amazon.com/Requiem-Battleship-Yamato-Bluejacket-Books/dp/1557505446