Free Wrong About Japan by Peter Carey

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 questionsI’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 ofquestions 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