I only every saw on episode of this, and I think it was one of the last ones where Japan's cowardly political leaders where on their way to sign the surrender on the alien's floating ship in Tokyo bay...until glorious batleship Yamato showed up!
But then there are episodes like the one where they destroy the entire civilization on the bad guys' home planet, and the general concensus is that they didn't want to do it, but the bad guys started the war and brought it upon themselves. So I don't know that it's the feel-good Japanese revisionist view of WWII that you expect it to be.
Japanese captains are expected to keep a calm, level head in any situation. Sometimes that means he may seem a little detached. Sometimes that means he may be somewhat cold. Sometimes that means the brass promoted a guy with Alzheimer's. It's the price you pay.
Little does our brave crew know that sinister forces are watching their every move. Oh sure, they're keeping quiet now, content to watch and plot from the security of their shiny gold box on the upper right hand corner.
But any moment now, one of them is going to move to the bottom of the screen and tell the pilots to use bombs wisely.
There was talk of an American live-action Star Blazers film being made in the 1990's overseen by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, yeah those two. Among the other ideas floated about, instead of the Yamamoto the sunken battleship used to make the space battleship would've been the USS Arizona.