Japan 07: Gundam Front

The most fascinating thing about the Gundam Front Experience located on the sixth floor of the Diver City Plaza at Odaiba in Tokyo is not the innovative Dome-G animated movie presentation; it's not the life-sized Strike Freedom Gundam torso or the battle-scarred Core Fighter GFT, and it's not the Character Photo spots that allow you to be photographed with characters from any of the Gundam series.

No, it's none of those things.  The most fascinating thing about the Gundam Front Experience is the exhibition that showcases the unbelievable amount of Gundam-related merchandise that has been produced over the last 36 years.

Photo by Karli

The display is located just outside of the paid area of the exhibition, and features the literally thousands of models and toys inspired by the various Gundam movies and television shows.

The range of items is staggering - it's easy to imagine a dedicated collector standing in this room for hours, alternately salivating and brooding as they examine the glass-fronted cases showing model after model after model.

However, to be fair, the paid area offers some unique experiences as well.  The Dome-G video presentation gives the audience an impressive 360-degree ants-eye view of life-sized battlesuit combat on a 16 meter wide hemispherical screen.  The illusion is epic in scale, dizzying and fast-paced, with two short videos in steady rotation.

Leaving the dome, guests enter the Experience Field, which features a life-sized torso of a ZGMF-X20A Strike Freedom Gundam, a full-sized recreation of a battered Core Fighter, and a scale model of the A Baoa Qu space fortress from the final episode of the original series.  Given that the original fortress is 13.5 kilometers tall, I think that the decision to go with a scale version was a prudent one.  There's also a pair of character photo-ops where you can be photographed with a character chosen from a full range of the Gundam programs.

The Experience also includes an area which explains the process by which the models are manufactured, and offers workshops in model building.  And, of course, if you're going to show people all those models, how they're made, and how to put them together, it seems only reasonable to offer the opportunity to buy some of them...

Merchandising aside, I enjoyed the Gundam Front Experience, although I admit to finding it a bit limited in terms of its scale - which is an odd thing to say about an exhibition dedicated to giant battlesuits.  However, I realize that it's intended for a more earnest fan of the series and its models than myself, and I can appreciate that for someone who was a serious follower, the Gundam Front Experience would be more than worth the price of admission.

And, for myself, I can now add "battlesuit pilot" to my list of geek achievements.

- Sid

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.

Japan 05: Idoru.

Her black hair, rough-cut and shining, brushed pale bare shoulders as she turned her head. She had no eyebrows, and both her lids and lashes seemed to have been dusted with something white, leaving her dark pupils in stark contrast.

And now her eyes met his.

He seemed to cross a line. In the very structure of her face, in geometries of underlying bone, lay coded histories of dynastic flight, privation, terrible migrations. He saw stone tombs in steep alpine meadows, their lintels traced with snow. A line of shaggy pack ponies, their breath white with cold, followed a trail above a canyon.

The curves of the river below were strokes of distant silver. Iron harness bells clanked in the blue dusk.

Laney shivered. In his mouth a taste of rotten metal.

The eyes of the idoru, envoy of some imaginary country, met his. 

William Gibson, Idoru

The manner in which life imitates art, or more specifically science fiction, never ceases to amaze me.  In William Gibson's 1996 novel Idoru, a musician decides to marry a digital Japanese pop star, or "idoru", who makes her public appearances as a hologram.

Welcome to the future - literally.  Hatsune Miku, whose name is Japanese for "the first sound from the future" is a vocaloid, the public face of a singing synthesizer application.  Miku started her virtual career in 2007, and has been doing live holographic appearances since 2009, including a performance as an opening act for Lady Gaga's ArtRave tour and a guest spot on David Letterman.

It's easy to see something like this as the future of pop music - a library of customizable digital performers who can be programmed with the musical style of your choice, and modified to match any audience demographic as desired. Come to think of it, have you ever noticed that when Taylor Swift* is performing live, sometimes you can almost see through her to the drummer...?

- Sid

* Dear Ms. Swift:  I tossed a coin and it came up heads, so I went with your name rather than Katy Perry's.  Please don't write a song about me.