i. The name Yamato precedes the state that claimed it, and survives the state that used it, and outlasts the ship that wore it. To name a thing is to pretend the thing coheres. The Kojiki (712 CE) lists Yamato among the provinces; the Nihon Shoki (720 CE) lists it as the center. By the time of the Engishiki (927 CE) it had become an honorific prefix. By the time of the Meiji Rescript on Education (1890) it was a verb.
ii. Yamato-damashii — "Yamato spirit" — is a term that appears in the Genji monogatari meaning practical wisdom, everyday competence. By 1890 it means racial essence. By 1941 it means battleship. The drift is not semantic; it is historical. The word is the same; the thing it points to has been wearing different clothes.
iii. The battleship Yamato (大和) displaced 72,809 long tons. Her nine 46 cm guns were the largest ever mounted on a warship. She was sunk in Operation Ten-Gō on 7 April 1945, 200 km south of Kyūshū, by coordinated American air attack. Of 2,778 crew, 2,498 died. The ship, the word, the epoch, and the idea all went down at the same coordinate.
iv. After 1945, Yamato retreats into the lexicon. It reappears in the 1974 anime Space Battleship Yamato, where the sunken hull is salvaged and converted into a spacecraft. This is, in a sense, the lookbook the twentieth century had been waiting for: the word rescued from its weight and given a uniform of stars.
v. This site does not judge the word. It only hangs it on an armature and lets the cold gallery light do the work. A lookbook does not argue. It presents, turns the page, presents again. The reader is the historian.
vi. Cf. Irma Boom, Book for Architects, 2009. Cf. Kengo Kuma, Anti-Object, 2008. Cf. Viviane Sassen, Umbra, 2014. Cf. every editorial that has ever refused to explain itself on the first page.