Blog #6: Japanese Liberal Democratic Party Begins Real Gundam Project

by Midday

Yup, you read that right. I don't mean the life-size Gundam standing in Odaiba; I mean an actual operational bipedal mobile suit military unit.

For those of you who don't know Gundam, you can start by reading the wiki. The Gundam series is the epitomy of mecha anime, a franchise that was started by the animation company Sunrise back in 1979. The franchise was well-received due to the plastic model sales instigated by Bandai Entertainment, and is currently still on-going with the newest TV series Gundam AGE, an HD remaster of Gundam SEED, and the newest movie series Gundam Unicorn.

The development of a real Gundam is known to have been under consideration since 2007, when SciencePortal.jp, a website run by the Japanese Science and Technology Agency predicted the development costs to be around ￥79,521,000,000. Masaaki Taira, member of the Liberal Democratic Party, has been enthusiastically discussing this possibility for a year with various professors and party members, and had a talk with Hideki Niwa, another party member, and Harutoshi Fukui, author of Gundam Unicorn during a 1-hour slot within the 12 hour nicolive live-stream broadcast held on June 28th.

Although much of the live-stream was saturated with otaku talk on mecha anime, which included not only Gundam, but also Patlabor and Appleseed XIII, there was some fruitful talk on the realization of the Gundam development project. The project would be funded mostly by the military departments of Japan, which are currently basically rendered defunct by the presence of U.S. dominance. Although the Gundam would be developed as a military unit by name, its actual practicality would lie more in the application of its technology to other daily-life appliances. A bipedal military unit would not have any place in the army this day in age, given that nothing stronger than nuclear weaponry is virtually necessary anymore (though ironically, there is one Gundam series that implements Gundam as the next strongest unit used to circumvent the ban on the use of nuclear weaponry). Moreover, the current project does not hold a levitation function, and therefore focuses more on the ability of a transportation device to "step over" grounds of radically volatile altitudes. In addition to its application to daily transportation, an actual Gundam would be best utilized as a tourist attraction, as the current Odaiba Gundam has proven. Taira claims that being able to see a Gundam in action would mean everything to tourists around the world. There also was some discussion on creating a donation bank for the realization of Gundam, but it has not been put into effect yet.

I believe that the realization of Gundam can only be made possible by Japan, where the eccentric fever of the franchise lies. Due to poor education, declining social standards, and rusty government policies, Japan has been seceding from most, if not all, of the current fronts on modern innovation and therefore has been continually losing ground as a first-world country. This realization of Gundam would bring international attention to Japan once more, along with financial support that Japan is in dire need of. Thoughts? The actual live broadcast (one hour) can be watched in Japanese from that nicolive link on the source list.

Source: ANN, nicolive, SciencePortal