I recall your post on the Japanese battleship Yamato being a colossal waste and poor weapon. My question is this, why then is there such a huge hype and culture around the ship?
It's worth noting that at the time of construction, battleships were considered the prevailing naval doctrine of the day, so the construction of a battleship as opposed to an aircraft carrier was considered a proper use of shipbuilding resources. Anyway, the point of the Yamato was to engage multiple battleships, it was intended to form a cornerstone in naval line battle against United States Navy capital ships and anchor the IJN fighting line. Japan believed that they could not compete with the United States in number of ship hulls produced, so it sought to make up for them by making individual ships larger and stronger. On paper, it's not a bad idea, but as I mentioned before, there were a lot of practical difficulties in operation that led to it being a waste.
As far as culturally speaking, Japanese militarists saw the Yamato and Musashi as visible expressions of Japanese naval engineering capability and a declaration of intent to surpass the western naval powers of the time: the United Kingdom and the United States (the latter being more important as the USA was seen as the Pacific naval power to rival Japan). Afterward, Yamato was mythologized, memorialized, and romanticized, as part of Japan's reckoning (or lack thereof) with their Second World War past. The name Yamato has been used as a symbol of national pride, anti-Western ideology, the victory of honor over cowardly self-preservation as its doomed sailors do their duty to the last in defense of their homeland, or as a means of aggressive foreign policy depending on the person - it's no surprise that it finds a lot of purchase among hardline Japanese militarist and Second World War apologists and warcrime denialists/minimizers.
Thanks for the question, Anon.
SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King