Read
Wrong About Japan. I understood more about Japan's anime and manga culture. The book says that the world wars are often the themes behind anime and manga such as Grave of the Fireflies and in fact Gundam series. In Gundam, children pilot huge destructive robots and are brought into wars.
"Certainly I saw the effects of World War II in almost anime we watched, in the continually crumbling cities, in those ever-present preternaturally powerful children who threatened to obliterate the universe, and most particularly in the series Mobile Suit Gundam, whose creator we set off to meet one sunny summer's day."....."At first I had been tempted to regard the robot as a kind of mechanized Godzilla, a metaphor for the technological might of the atomic bomb." Indeed, it may seems wierd and unrealistic that children should ever get involved in war and hence why the Japanese are so obsessed in anime such as the Gundam series that depicts children as almightly killers and upholders of justice. That was the reservation that the author has in mind. Mr. Tomino, creator of Gundam however provided an astonishing insight - that "
public responsibility, the responsibility of all [japanese] citizens, is very great". "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 intepreter continued, "there is nothing very unusual about having such young boys taking par in a war. In fact, the last two war worlds were the first major conflicts where children did not fight. Perhaps that was a mistake by adults." Mr Tomino also revealed that Gundam was produced to sell toy robots. The toy producer wanted the Gundam setting to be on earth, which Mr tomino disagree and refused to gave in to... Eventually, he created the space colony that had features of earth, land and water. Well this book is certanily enriching and i hope to share with anyone who reads my blog and is a great fan of Gundam.
Another insight into why Japanese like robots in anime and manga.
"The first really successful robot was Mazinga. Here, a young boy operates a robot. He goes onto the robot's head and rides it. It was Mazinga that began this robot boom in Japanese anime and it was the oil shock which esured its continuance." "oil shock?" I asked "The oil crisis. After that, it was too expensive to hve robots in live-action films. There was no question that people wanted robots, that's only natural. But because of the oil shock, the robots wee all animated." "But why thuis obsession with robots?" "As I said, toys." Reasonable, i thought. It would have been too costly to even pcreate a real life size robot for filming purposes even when oil prices are low.
