Wrong About Japan (9 page)

There were also two Sunrise executives whose cards I have, typically but regretfully, since lost. For some doubtless simple reason, everyone at this meeting was Mr., never san.

Charley had bought one of Mr. Tomino’s books to be autographed and he gravely, gracefully obliged, choosing a large fat gold pen. There would be a price for this.

“So you like Gundam?” Mr. Tomino asked in English.

“Yes.”

This, in my son’s view, was payment enough. But Mr. Tomino was pressing him like a fifth-grade teacher. What exactly had Charley liked about Mobile Suit Gundam?

Six pairs of adult eyes were on him.

“I like the story line,” he admitted, “and how it’s complicated.” He paused. Mr. Tomino nodded encouragingly Three tape recorders turned. “The characters are complicated too,” he said, then turned to me for help.

I asked Mr. Tomino when he had thought of making an anime or manga.

As I spoke, Japanese translations of questions
I’d submitted prior to the meeting—most of which I had by now forgotten—were being passed around the table.

Mr. Tomino lowered his eyes and began to speak in a soft, musical voice which seemed, to my ear, at variance with his animated manner.

“Mr. Tomino doesn’t even want to make an anime now,” Paul translated in a very English-sounding English that gave no indication of his Greek blood or his Japanese life. “Mr. Tomino,” he said, “just wants to make films.”

Mr. Tomino moved the sheet containing my questions a few inches to the left and then spoke for a minute or two.

“Gundam was launched just to sell toy robots,” said Paul at last, “to create a product that people would buy. There is no real inspiration behind it. He made Gundam because it was his job to make Gun-dam. And before Gundam, he made lots of animations which were also used to advertise robot toys.”

If Charley was disappointed by this news, he did not reveal it.

Mr. Tomino explained further, and Paul conveyed the explanation: “You see, Mr. Tomino was also very interested in science fiction, so he wanted to make something that was like a movie and that could incorporate these robots. That was his job.
But when he was asked to make Gundam, the only condition he had was that the robot should be twenty metres tall. Then the toy makers wanted him to have a one-hundred-metre robot.”

I wondered if that was a good thing or a bad thing but missed my chance to ask.

“That,” said Paul, “gave Mr. Tomino a logical problem. A hundred-metre robot would be very heavy.”

“Too heavy,” Mr. Tomino said in English.

“If it was to stand and walk on a normal asphalt road,” Paul explained, “that was a problem. There was another problem: the toy makers wanted to set the story on Earth, but Mr. Tomino wanted it in space.”

“In the universe,” insisted Mr. Tomino.

“But the toy makers were adamant,” Paul soon translated. “They needed the planet Earth, they said, in order to show how huge the robot was. So Mr. Tomino compromised. He created the Space Colony, which had mountains and rivers and things that were of more earthly scale. But not even that was enough, so in the end he was forced to bring Gundam to Earth. Of course he was resistant—in Mr. Tomino’s mind, the Mobile Suits were things that couldn’t work, couldn’t even move on this planet.”

What did all this mean to Mr. Tomino? It was impossible to guess. In any case, he slid my list of
questions back a few inches to the right. In the original English, my second question had read: “Charley and I were always interested in watching Mobile Suit Gundam. However, we continually wondered what we were missing. What might be obvious to a Japanese viewer but inaccessible to us?”

Mr. Tomino closed his eyes and made a long
mmmmmmm
sound before he answered.

“There is nothing you are missing,” Paul translated, “and the reason is that Mr. Tomino made sure there wouldn’t be anything like that at all. For instance, he tried to avoid having ethnicity and so he replaced
common sense
, which is based on culture, with
general sense
, which is a kind of universal sense that all human beings have.”

Huh?

“Mr. Tomino tried to remove all cultural elements.”

“Perhaps,” I suggested, “he is being universal in a Japanese way.”

Mr. Tomino was nice enough to laugh.

“But when a character speaks,” I insisted, “and they speak the Japanese language, surely the
way
they speak must communicate some social value? If so, we foreigners can’t hear that. Might a character’s voice not suggest a place of birth or a level of education?”

“Ahhhhh”
said Mr. Tomino, as if I had understood nothing.

“Mr. Tomino thinks,” said Paul, “that there is maybe something in your own character which is interested in national identity. As for Mr. Tomino, he has avoided it completely. He has always tried to make his characters as standard and as universal as possible by
not
giving them local colour or national colour or ethnic colour.”

“I suspect Mr. Tomino will disagree,” I said, “but there is no escaping the fact that you have invented a big war story and that type of story affects children’s emotions a great deal. On one side of the equation, you give them a sense of power. When they vicariously become Gundam pilots, they have great might. But when they are children in a war, they are terrified, if not traumatised forever.”

“Well,” Mr. Tomino explained through Paul, “in order to have a story that would involve the toy maker’s products, the suits and the weapons, it was necessary to have a story involving armies. And if you have armies and weapons then you need to have battles.

“And then the toy manufacturers wanted the characters to be children, because children will buy the toys. But it is true,” Paul interpreted, “that the theme of having the battlefield and children is a very interesting one for Mr. Tomino. He can remember something about World War II and of course he heard stories from his father and his father’s friends.
At that time in Japan you had to go to military academy when you were sixteen, to war when you were seventeen. Boys became adults between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. Also, you must remember there had been samurai who fought on the battlefields when they were as young as thirteen.

“Thinking about it historically,” our interpreter continued, “there is nothing very unusual about having such young boys taking part in a war. In fact, the last two world wars were the first major conflicts where children did not fight. Perhaps that was a mistake made by adults.”

“How do you mean?”

“Being able to fight in a war is an expression of one’s citizenship. If you are an adult, you do it as a responsible citizen. But if you are a child—these days, I mean—war makes you either a victim or an accomplice.”

This was getting way too Japanese for me. I told Mr. Tomino I did not quite get this point.

“‘Victim’ and ‘accomplice’ both have to do with crime, but ‘citizenship’ has to do with public duty and responsibility.”

This reply shocked me a little, but delighted me too. Here, after all, was evidence of the intensely different cultural view Charley and I had suspected was buried deep in anime. Here was all the good stuff Mr. Tomino had told me did not exist.

“You see,” Paul translated again, “in the time since World War II, we’ve completely forgotten what happens to children during wartime and the parts they have played. So Mr. Tomino has no qualms at all about having children in a fighting role in the story. That’s how it’s been throughout history. The public responsibility the responsibility of all citizens, is very great.”

“It’s a burden,” Paul said, and I was briefly confused as to whether he was translating or giving his own opinion. “And that’s something he wanted to include in Gundam. At the same time, when the children put on the Mobile Suits it’s not something that’s cool and logical and rational—it’s when a child becomes a hero. It has to do with glory and it has to do with honour.”

“Japan,” I said, “has been a society in which honour plays an important role. Would Tomino agree that this actually makes Gundam very Japanese?”

“Yes.”

“Also,” I suggested, “if you’re Japanese and watching Gundam, you will think about samurai more than once?”

“No.”

“No?” I asked, incredulous.

Mr. Tomino closed his eyes and shook his head.

Now I regret not introducing Takashi to him, and also that I did not ask how, for God’s sake, he could say that Gundam Mobile Suits are not
exactly
like samurai. But I had reached that point that can arrive easily in an interpreted interview—locked inside my skin, lost in space, emotionally disconnected from my fellow humans.

The interview, of course, continued.

To Takashi, waiting on the street outside, it must have seemed forever.

7.

Not so far from the ancient temple of Gokokuji we met our first real otaku. Yuka Minakawa was an attractive, gym-toned young woman in a yellow dress and fuck-me heels who came clicking so sexily toward us across Kodansha’s banklike foyer. Could
this be an otaku? Yes, absolutely. Could it be a woman? I didn’t think so. I glanced at Charley.

“It’s okay” he said. “I get it.”

“Are you cool?”

“Dad, we live in the West Village.”

As our eccentric little party crossed the foyer, Charley looked at me poker-faced and said: “Finally, the Real Japan.”

Of course to think that manga and transsexual otakus are somehow more authentic than temples is wrongheaded, but this actually was
our
Japan, and we liked it here.

We passed a room of suited men gravely considering a toy robot on a conference table. In another room, Charley and I were presented with an encyclopedic book titled
Gundam Officials, Limited Edition
. To say this was as large as a telephone book severely understates the case, for it weighed almost seven pounds, concrete evidence of the otaku mindset and an extreme consequence, perhaps, of an education system based on the accumulation and memorization of data.

My son, I knew, would never surrender the gift. I was doomed to lug it home across the world, this gorgeously produced, very expensive tome in which every known fact about Mobile Suit Gundam was carefully documented and illustrated, with the sort
of respect you might expect in the owner’s manual for a Rolex Rocket Ship. It was the Real Japan, and we could not read a word of it.

Now we gathered in another conference room, and here we were invited to ask Yuka, the author of this bible, anything we liked. Charley, as usual, was reluctant to speak, but when I replayed the audio-tapes back in New York—hearing myself ask Yuka: What was this thing with robots? What was an otaku?— I wondered how difficult it would be for an outsider to recognise that my son was the author of my questions.

Paul translated Yuka’s reply, which, on the tape at home, was still delicate and careful but much more male than I had noticed at the time. “In the middle eighties, there was a Japanese science-fiction author called Moto Arai. One of her stylistic tics was to address the reader very formally with the second person pronoun, otaku, a much more distant form than the French
vous
, for instance. Her fans liked this book so much that they adopted this peculiar usage, referring to each other as ‘otaku.’”

I had read enough to imagine that I understood. “Isn’t it an extremely respectful form of address?” I asked.

“No!” Yuka cried in English.

Charley’s eyes flicked my way.

“The way ‘otaku’ is used now,” Paul translated, “it’s the reverse. It is no longer about fans imitating Moto Arai’s prose. It’s not fun anymore. It’s not respectful, it’s discriminatory. It’s like calling you ‘sir’ when I don’t really mean it. It’s ironic, sarcastic.”

Okay, so the word’s
dripping
with discrimination. “But doesn’t it have a number of meanings?”

“Of course,” Paul said. “It can be used for people who are enthusiastic about almost anything. In English you might say
aficionado
, although it is also rather like
nerd.”