Pilgrimage to Mecha

The sentinel stood sentry go 60 feet above Shiokaze Park in Odaiba, Japan, silent except for the occasional hiss of steam escaping from its joints. Below it teemed a crowd of onlookers who had come to looke the unlikely spectacle. To some, IT was an astounding deed of engineering, a contemporary Colosssus of Rhodes. To others, information technology was a pointless (if impressive) curiosity. But whatever else the statue was, it was a mammoth celebration of popular culture: a broad-shell reproduction of the titular automaton from the innovational Movable Suit Gundam anime, built to commemorate the enfranchisement's 30th anniversary.

Make no mistake: Gundam is a big deal in Japanese Islands. To put it in context for a Western consultation, Gundam is the Japanese equivalent of Star Wars, complete with an iconic disguised adversary, optical maser swords and modern installments of dubious quality. Merely that comparability doesn't explain the presence of a 60-foot up statue that took finished two months and millions of dollars to complete.

What's so special almost Gundam, anyway?

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

To sympathize why the Gundam franchise has much lasting appeal in Japanese culture, you must low understand wherefore robots themselves are so remarkable in post-war Japan. Robots, subsequently complete, are a striking example of advanced technology and industry, ideas that have been central to Japanese culture for a century and a half. Since Commodore Matthew Perry sailed his ships into Japanese waters in 1853, Japan has undergone two successful periods of highly rapid modernisation: first as the feudalistic Tokugawa authoritarianism scrambled to becharm up to the industrialized West, and once again in the consequence of World War II.

After its vote down at the hands of the Allied powers in 1945, many Japanese were forced to confront the idea that they had been beaten, among other things, past the technological favourable position of their foes, not the least of which was the terrifying might of the atomic bomb. Japan at that metre was a tired, war-worn country, and the initial retrieval was slow. Still, once manufacturers repaired and replaced bombed-unfashionable infrastructure and the country grew person-sufficient once more, things sped up. Nippon aggressively pursued manufacturing and postindustrial technology under the slogan "Enamour rising to and Surpass the Advanced Nations of the West."

One of the new advances in technology that Japan's manufacturing sector quickly embraced was the heavy-duty robot. Not only did robots make manufacturing more simpler, their ubiquity in Japanese factories became typical of the state's stated goal of modernization: They were a symbol that Japan was technologically advanced and fit to take its place on the world present.

Japan was not the first country to pursue highly-developed robotics, merely information technology did so with uncommon exuberance, an attitude which remains to this day: Eastern Samoa of 2008, the body politic still leads the world in both stock and sales of industrial robots. As robots took their place in Japanese factories, sol besides did they take their place in Japanese bolt down culture. In 1952, Osamu Tezuka, now considered same of the forefathers of fashionable manga, published the first volume of Tetsuwan Atomu, known in the West as Astro Boy. Astro Boy followed the eponymic young golem as he fought law-breaking and observed man in a classic Pinocchio tale. Unlike most Western robots, so much A those of Isaac Asimov or The Jetsons' Rosie, Astro Boy was not a servant or a crony; in his story, the robot was the hero.

Things only got larger from there. Astro Male child was followed by Tetsujin 28-go (or Gigantor in the Westmost) in 1956, which many consider the forerunner of modern mecha – a term which has come to touch o to hi-tech machines and vehicles that walk, are controlled by a cowcatcher and are usually human-shaped. Drop dead Nagai's Mazinger Z, 1st publicised in 1972, was the first to feature the now-standard approximation of a airplane pilot controlling the giant machine from a cockpit privileged its body. All of these early mecha series were unbelievably prestigious, and all retain some measure of popularity true today – Tetsujin is even acquiring its ain spirit-size statue in Kobe, for example.

Only somehow, Gundam still towers all over every other mecha series. After totally, where are the inventors announcing plans to build a life-sized, working Tetsujin within 10 years? Where is the displeased annunciation that Nippon's USD Ministry "is not in load of Astro Boy"? Why does a land that loves robots so much love Gundam to a higher degree the rest?

Flight Toward the Future

Gundam may not have got been the first colossus robot series, simply it did pioneer the sol-called "real robot" genre. Whereas "super robots" care Mazinger Beaver State Tetsujin are usually charming heroes whose enemies are generically-evil "foreign agents" like monsters or aliens, and whose pilots win the combat based happening their bravery and fighting spirit, the "proper robot" genre is to a lesser extent fantastical and grounded more in human concerns.

The antagonists of Gundam weren't monsters, merely just other humankind World Health Organization lived in space colonies around the Earth. The appellation RX-78-2 Gundam (and every last of the franchise's machines that would follow in its footsteps) was No wizardly existence, but rather a powerful objet d'art of soldierlike hardware, and main character Amuro Ray was an engineering student WHO fell into the cockpit and controlled it after reading the owner's manual. It was a show occupied with shades of gray, where the protagonists could be cowards and the antagonists could be soldiers simply doing their responsibility and where characters on both sides of the universe's Unmatchable-Year Warfare – operating room those caught in the middle – could pop off without warning. (So, atomic number 3 befits a country whose constitution forbids it from possessing a standing army, the various shows in the Gundam metaseries are all rather anti-war in several regard.)

While superhero robots like Voltron are an impossibility, advancements in military applied science are commonplace. The franchise's creators and fans take its engineering gravely, likewise: Supplementary material often features additional chance variabl models not seen in the anime series, and commanding-ending model kits admit schemata of the inner mechanical workings for fans to centre over as military buffs might examine the details of modern jet fighters. Eve the giant Gundam in Odaiba featured realistic warning labels good "dangerous" pieces of fictional machinery, advising mechanics to check a extinct maintenance blue-collar for help.

Gundam's hyperadvanced applied science may approach magic, but it still remains within the bounds of plausibleness. There is nary reality-warping, faster-than-light travel, only space colonies in orbit more or less Earth. On that point are no aliens or interstellar empires, solely human race fighting amongst themselves over the things that humans have always fought over: big businessman, independency and greed. All of these in combination create a smel that Gundam, more than any other mecha serial publication, could someday get ahead a reality.

Disdain logic, physics and political economy all pointing to the impracticality of giant humanoid fighting machines, that hasn't stopped the Japanese Defense Ministry from presenting an exhibit about the use of martial robots called "Towards the Realization of Gundam." Sure, that might have got been a publicity stunt, just it was a publicity stunt that worked, because it tapped into a part of Japan's cultural consciousness that wants Gundam to be real. In a culture that equates robots with technological power, what could cost better than the most advanced (real) robot possible?

Cardinal-Foot Lookout

The statue of Amuro Ray's RX-78-2 Gundam in Shiokaze Park may non have been fully useable, but IT was the next best thing. Though primarily built past Namco Bandai as a celebration of the franchise's 30th anniversary, information technology was also a part of the "Green Tokyo" campaign to promote the Japanese capital as a host site for the 2022 Olympics. (Clearly, the company must have reasoned, the city with the biggest giant robot would be the most meriting to host the Summer Games.)

Tokyo's Olympic bid ended in vote down, but that doesn't mean the statue itself was a failure, at least non according to Gundam Lord Yoshiyuki Tomino. During a press league, Tomino said that while he had initially feared that the statue would equal something "that looked really nickel-and-dime and tawdry," atomic number 2 found himself moved by the final product:

I look tremendous strength and power from this huge Odaiba robot. It really focuses happening what I like to call toy-like colors. These toy-ilk colours don't have the color of real weapons and real tools of destruction. They're peaceful colours. Happy colors, the kinds of colors that puny kids like. And they are the kinds of colors that encourage the great unwashe to pronounce, "don't give up hope. Have expectant expectations and have got slap-up hopes for the future of human kind."

For Tomino, hope is one of the reasons Gundam remains thusly popular 30 years later: Though Gundam's war is still tragic and senseless and its humans nonetheless petty and flawed, the serial is not without hope for humanity as a whole. All over the path of the story, Amuro and others evolve into psychic Newtypes – a literal "new typecast" of human. This is not a random mutation, insists Tomino, but the manifestation of the idea that human race can evolve into something beyond itself when there is a need for IT – every bit there is now. "It's a very melancholic situation, in reality, that Gundam has something to say to us, and that the world has deteriorated pertinent that we do need a Newtype," says Tomino.

Even though crowds of people came from all across Japan to imag the Odaiba statue, the Gundam creator says the sort of "clean positive reaction" atomic number 2'd hoped to see toward the project came from overseas. The curiosity, hullabaloo and surprisal we Westerners displayed at this seemingly silly fancy was incisively what Tomino would have liked to see in his native Japan. Interestingly enough, Tomino attributes this halfhearted response to the ubiquity of Gundam in the Land of the Rising Sun: "Japanese people stimulate become sort of blasé. They're excessively used to Gundam. They don't receive the ability to be dumfounded as much atomic number 3 before."

Perhaps he has a point. This is, later each, the rural area with themed Zeon and Confederacy bars where one can order cocktails like the Zaku Tank or the Black Tri-Stars. This is the country where iconic antagonist Char Aznable decorates everything from mobile phones to Game Son Pull ahead handhelds to reference cards. This is the country where megapopular J-rocker (and disreputable Gundam fan) Gackt played the famous Gihren Zabi funeral speech before a concert and got a stadium full of screaming girls to join him in intonation "Sieg Zeon!" This is a country where Gundam arcade games take place in a life-sized diversion of a mobile suit cockpit.

Maybe it isn't that Japan wants Gundam to be actual. Maybe IT's that, in a sense, IT already is.

John Flinch is not ashamed to admit that his license plate is the in-universe designation for the Freedom Gundam from Gundam SEED.

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/pilgrimage-to-mecha/

Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/pilgrimage-to-mecha/

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