Japan's Life-Sized Gundam, Through the Years

In my last post on Chinatown, I mentioned revisiting Gundam Factory while in Yokohama. It was on my list of 2022 highlights, too, but it closes next month year, so there’s not much time left to see it. For me, seeing this 59-foot robot swing its arms and legs in a walking motion and do deep knee-bends was the culmination of a 12-year (now, 13-year) journey. I had already seen plenty of Gundam in Japan, beginning in 2010, as I followed around various life-sized versions of it, saw it draw famous visitors like Guillermo del Toro, and saw it evolve into a dynamic, quasi-ambulatory mech.

I recently went back and started watching the original Mobile Suit Gundam anime series, which gave rise to one of the world’s highest-grossing media franchises after model kits and movie compilations helped it bounce back from cancellation in 1980. Though they both started before my time, in the late 1970s, and soon encompassed a vast toy and merchandise empire, the scale of Mobile Suit Gundam makes Star Wars look like a small space rebellion (which is technically what its “Rebel” heroes are fighting, anyway). Droids like C-3PO and R2-D2 are dwarfed by Gundam and the giant Zaku robots it battles.

In 2009, for the 30th anniversary of the Gundam franchise, a full-scale statue of the giant robot went up in Shiokaze Park on Tokyo’s manmade island of Odaiba. By the time I moved to Japan in 2010, this Gundam had taken up a sword elsewhere, in Shizuoka, which is where I first saw it. They had it set up in East Shizuoka Square outside JR Higashi-Shizuoka Station. If you were lucky, you could see Mount Fuji behind it, but the day I was there, there were only clouds to behold.

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