At nearly 72,000 tons fully loaded, with nine 18.1-inch guns in turrets that each weighed over 2,500 tons, more than an entire American destroyer, Yamato was the largest and most powerfully armed battleship ever constructed. Yet it fired its main guns at enemy surface ships exactly once, and today it is best known around the world as an animated spaceship. This episode traces how Japan’s quality-over-quantity answer to American industrial might became a victim of the changing nature of warfare and a tragic symbol of a collapsing empire.

From the Kure Naval Arsenal, where the dry dock was deepened by a meter and a sisal rope canopy hid the hull from spy planes, the story follows the ship as Admiral Yamamoto’s distant flagship at Midway, a heavily armored troop transport shuttling between Truk and Kure, a torpedo target for USS Skate in December 1943, a floating flak fortress with over 160 25mm guns, and finally the centerpiece of Operation Ten-Go, a one-way mission to beach itself at Okinawa in April 1945 that ended under nearly 300 American aircraft with over 3,000 crew lost.

• Why Japan left the League of Nations and the Washington Naval Treaty and bet on a single unblockable haymaker against a nation producing 35 percent of the world’s industrial output
• How hydrostatic shock from one torpedo sheared rivets at the armor belt seams and let in roughly 3,000 tons of water
• The Battle off Samar, October 25, 1944: Kurita mistakes Taffy 3’s escort carriers for fleet carriers, and armor-piercing shells pass clean through unarmored destroyers like Johnston and Hoel without detonating
• Sanshiki ‘beehive’ shells that blinded Yamato’s own fire control radar, and the magazine explosion that tore the ship in half with a mushroom cloud seen from over 100 miles away
• Space Battleship Yamato, Star Blazers, the wreck found in the 1980s at 340 meters, and the debate over whether pop culture processed national trauma or sanitized history