Japan 06: Mobile Suit Gundam.

Japan is a country of contrasts between the old and the new, the traditional and the modern. On Tuesday, my friend Terry takes Karli and I to Haruna Jinja, an isolated Shinto shrine which was founded in 586 AD. Our visit is quiet and contemplative - it is impossible to ignore the spiritual feeling of the temple and its mountain location.

Wednesday finds us in Tokyo's ultra-modern Odaiba district, the artificial island home of the imposing 18 metre statue of Mobile Suit Gundam, taken from the 1979 animated series of the same name.  The statue stands guard over the Diver City Plaza, which houses the Gundam Front multimedia experience and exhibition.

Mobile Suit Gundam is a bit like Japan's Star Trek. The original groundbreaking series actually didn't do well in terms of ratings, and only 43 episodes were produced.  However, as with Star Trek, the program developed a large underground following, and over time that cult popularity led to new TV shows, movies, video games, novels, comics books and model kits.

This culminated in the construction of a life-sized reproduction of boy-pilot Amuro Ray's original powered battlesuit in 2009, in order to commemorate the show's 30th anniversary.  Originally located in Shizuoka Prefecture, it was relocated to Odaiba in 2011*.

The statue has been on the global bucket list for geeks since it was built, and Karli astutely asks, "This is why we came to Japan, isn't it?"  Not entirely, but I freely admit that it was certainly the first thing I thought of when I started planning a Japanese adventure.

The crowd surrounding the statue indicates that I'm not the only person who felt obliged to visit this towering entry from the Geek Seven Wonders of the World.**  It's impressively detailed, with all the little access panels and stencilled warnings that you would expect on a 60 foot military warbot, and it's obviously kept clean and in good repair.  It's actually a bit sad to think that there are more legitimate monuments that receive much less attention.

In saying that, I do the original Gundam series a bit of an injustice. Series creator Yoshiyuki Tomino wanted to illustrate the grim reality of war - the first episode prominently features the deaths of innocent civilians, and the pilots of the opposing mobile suits are never shown as faceless drones, but as soldiers who feel pain and fear as they die.

Once we finish admiring - and photographing - the statue, we head inside for a visit to the Gundam Front exhibition for part two of the mobile suit experience - posting to follow!

- Sid

* Sadly, I gather that they took it apart and moved it rather than having it walk or fly to its new home.

**  Other entries would be the original San Diego Comic-Con, the Doctor Who Experience, Kennedy Space Centre and the Lord of the Rings sets for Hobbiton.  I welcome suggestions for two more geek must-sees.