This gallery is a labor of love, meant to open up archival resources to the many Yamato fans world-wide, and perhaps help the Yamato/Musashi ship modeler to improve the accuracy of the kits they are building.

I hope that you will get as much enjoyment out of viewing these photos as I have gotten from finding them.

ESSAY ON THE YAMATO - PART I:

The Battleship Yamato only saw battle three times during the entire Second World War (or two times, if you don't count being torpedoed once by the submarine USS Skate in 1943).

While there is some evidence from IJN sources that her guns scored several hits at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944 (described later on under accompanying photos), she was strategically obsolete the day that she was launched, for a mere week and a half earlier, the Japanese had themselves exploded the myth of the battleship during their daring attack on Pearl Harbor with carrier-borne aircraft.

This was to be a war dominated by carrier-borne aircraft, not huge battleships.

And yet.

Despite going down in just over 2 hours of bombardment by US Navy planes off Okinawa on April 7th, 1945, this gigantic ship still captivates the mind and inspires tens of thousands of ship modelers around the world to build the literally dozens of models of this ship, in all scales.

As a Japanese historian once noted - "once you learn the story of the Yamato, it becomes an obsession."

And, I might add, you need not be Japanese to share that obsession. Witness the International Yamato Owners Association, for one, the only qualification for which is having built a 1/200 or larger RC scale model of this ship.