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Mobile Suit Gundam and the Japanese Memory of War

Thesis · September 2006

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.3474.6724

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 Mobile Suit Gundam
and
the Japanese Memory of War

John Tennant

A Dissertation submitted in
part-fulfillment of the requirements for the
Masters of Arts in Japanese Language and Society
by Distance Learning

Faculty of Social Sciences

School of East Asian Studies
University of Sheffield

September 2006

1
Table of Contents
Note on names............................................................................................................. 3
Introduction.................................................................................................................. 4
A Future Memory of the Past................................................................................... 4
The Past Struggle.................................................................................................... 7
Narrative and Popular Culture............................................................................... 12
Anime and War...................................................................................................... 22
Why Gundam?....................................................................................................... 24
Main Body.................................................................................................................. 28
Gundam as a Genre.............................................................................................. 28
Narrative Conventions........................................................................................... 33
Study Methodology................................................................................................ 39
The Historical Truthfulness of Gundam................................................................. 42
The Audience......................................................................................................... 43
The Elements of the Story..................................................................................... 44
The Teller............................................................................................................... 59
Images and Consequences of Violence................................................................ 66
War in the Pocket – An example............................................................................ 71
Grief and Remembrance....................................................................................... 77
Conclusion................................................................................................................. 81
Appendix A................................................................................................................. 85
List of References...................................................................................................... 86

2
Note on names

Japanese names are given in Japanese order with surnames first, given names
second. Macrons are used to indicate long vowels except in words, such as sumo,
which are well known to the western reader.

The original Mobile Suit Gundam is a successful science fiction animation series that
has spawned numerous sequels, extensions, in many different media much like the
original Star Trek television series. I have used the following naming conventions:

Gundam The meta-series as a whole

Gundam Titular robot piloted by the protagonist
Mobile Suit Gundam Original television series
Zeta Gundam TV sequel
Char’s Counterattack Feature film sequel
War in the Pocket OAV sequel
Stardust Memories OAV sequel
Gundam Wing TV sequel
The 08th MS Team OAV sequel
Gundam SEED TV sequel

All names of Gundam characters, nations, and organizations are as given in the
American DVD releases.

3
Introduction

A Future Memory of the Past

At the beginning of the 21st century, it seems clear that the events of Japan’s

wars from the mid 20th century continue to have an impact on Japanese society.

There is the debate, both domestic and international, engendered by the Japanese

government approval for use in high schools of a revisionist history textbook. There

was also the predictable condemnation by the Korean and Chinese governments of

prime minister Koizumi’s annual visits to Yasukuni Shrine. Whether or not the prime

minister should visit Yasukuni was a defining issue in the election for Koizumi’s

successor as the next president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (Asahi

Shimbun, 2006; Onishi, 2006a). There is also the conflict between some teachers

and education boards regarding the national flag, the Hinomaru, and the national

anthem, “Kimigayo”, which some view as symbols of Japan’s militarist past (Tokita,

2006). There have been the myriad of court cases dealing with issues such as the

“comfort women” (Kakuchi, 1998; CNN.com, 2001a; International Herald

Tribune/Asahi Shimbun, 2006), the Yokohama incident (Asahi Shimbun, 2005), and

the Japanese war orphans abandoned in China at the end of the war (BBC News,

2005; Mainichi Daily News, 2005) . There have also been a number of popular films

dealing with war related themes (Onishi, 2005b; Gerow, 2006), including a big budget

battleship Yamato film (Telegraph.co.uk, 2005).

It has been argued that Japanese society still sees itself as being postwar

(sengo), in what is called “the long postwar” (Gluck, 1993, 66). In her essay, “The

Past in the Present”, Gluck suggests that the Japanese memory of the war will not

4
change until “those who experienced the war and sengo finally [cede] their long

prominence to children who had barely heard of the oil shock when they were born . .

. . Only then [will] ‘the long postwar’ end and the collective construction of post-

postwar memory finally begin” (1993, 94). The last generation that experienced the

war directly, mostly as children, has only recently begun to cede their prominence to

those who experienced only the postwar. The current contestation for LDP

presidency is an example of the current generational change with the initial

challenger to the leading candidate, 51 year old Abe Shinzo, being 69 year old

Fukuda Yasuo (who eventually decided not to run). Meanwhile, the generation born

during the oil shock is only now in their 30s and making their presence felt in society.

This ‘oil shock’ generation is also a generation that grew up with a new kind of

popular culture: anime. Anime, as a form of animated film, developed in Japan with

its roots being in the limited animation necessary due to the cost constraints of

television productions. The television production Tetsuwan Atomu , known as Astro

Boy in English speaking markets, was among the first Japanese animated television

programs, but because it was created by Tezuka Osamu1, storytelling was not

sacrificed, but rather had to be emphasized. As LaMarre (2002, 339) says “[Tezuka]

submitted that viewers [would] accept the shortfalls of limited animation if they were

sufficiently interested in the story.” LaMarre argues that in the 1960s and into the

1970s, anime developed into its own form of popular culture, separate from other

kinds of animation and cinema, and believes that it was in several television series

“of the 1970s that the transformations in Japanese animation of the 1960s came to

be fully expressed. At the same time, the appearance of a journal devoted entirely to

1
Widely acknowledged as Japan’s greatest manga artist and known as manga no kamisama [the
god of comics] (Drazen, 2003, 5).

5
anime, Animage, underscored the new awareness of a distinctive anime aesthetic.”

(LaMarre, 2002, 335).

One of the series that LaMarre cites is Uchû Senkan Yamato which was

released in English as Star Blazers. In this series, the Yamato, the giant Japanese

battleship sunk in the closing days of the Pacific War, is raised and refurbished to go

on an interstellar journey to save the Earth from the effects of radiation unleashed

during war. This anime series, although aimed at children, explores themes of war in

relative complexity, is considered a classic of the anime form and was voted the 12 th

best anime of all time in a TV Asahi poll from September 2005 (Anime News

Network, 2005).

The number one anime from the TV Asahi poll was Gundam. Gundam is not

a merely single television series, but a number of television series, theatrical films,

and direct-to-video releases that arguably occupy a similar niche in Japanese

popular culture as Star Trek and Star Wars do in American culture. The various

Gundam series generally tell a story of hegemonic warfare set in a science fiction

setting where the war takes place on Earth and in space colonies close to Earth. The

defining feature are the ‘mobile suits’: giant, humanoid robots which are actually

piloted and are a cross between a fighter plane, a tank, and a suit of armour.

The initial Gundam series, Kido Senshi Gundam (Mobile Suit Gundam), was

first aired in 1979 when Gluck’s ‘oil shock’ children were about six years old. Like

Star Trek before it, Mobile Suit Gundam was actually cancelled during its initial run

but became popular after being edited down to three compilation movies. Since then

there have been Gundam releases almost annually. Gundam has also become a

multimedia juggernaut with comic books (manga), novels, video games, toys, and

6
models all being produced. The ‘oil shock’ generation quite literally grew up with

Gundam.

For me, an interesting question is: what kind of memory of war will these

children, who were born in the 1970s and who grew up watching Gundam, construct?

Or to put it in a more straightforward manner, will Gundam help shape the post-

postwar memory of the war? This is an unanswerable question at the moment, but

what is relevant to the present is the shaping of that memory to be. Dower (1993,

248) argues that “the political debate in Japan involves a struggle to shape the

historical consciousness of the young who have no personal recollection of the war.”

This struggle that Dower refers to is at the centre of the textbook debate and at the

core of the Hinomaru and “Kimigayo” conflict, and it currently continues with possible

revision of the Fundamental Law of Education (Onishi, 2006b) and perhaps the

Japanese constitution itself.

The Past Struggle

Gluck describes four major categories of custodians of Japan’s history each

contributing to the creation of the narrative of Japan’s wartime past (1993, 70-78).

Her first custodians were the “progressive critics” of Japan’s prewar and wartime past

who first emerged following the war. These critics included intellectuals, academics,

and educators who wished to sever modern Japan’s connection with its Meiji and

early Showa past because they felt it was the fundamental nature of the prewar state

that led to the war. These progressives were among the most enthusiastic

supporters of the reforms imposed during the Occupation.

7
 The second group of custodians were conservative politicians and government

officials who wished to stress continuity with the past. This group wished to

emphasize the progress made by Japan since the Meiji period while de-emphasizing

the wartime period as an aberration. Because these bureaucrats and politicians had

been able to remain in government and political institutions through wartime, the

occupation and after, this group had a vested interest in maintaining continuity with

the past because they owed their position and status to that very past–they were

continuity personified.

The third and fourth groups of custodians were the media in all its forms, and

individuals and their own memories of the war. The media in all its permutations--

television, stage, film, fiction, comics, newspapers and magazines–tended not to

represent the war period except for emphasizing “those who suffered the travails of

modernity and war”–the common people (Gluck,1993, 74). The suffering of ordinary

people struck a chord with most individual Japanese since almost everyone suffered

during either the wartime or the Occupation. Popular media representations of the

past and the personal memories of people emphasized the helplessness and

suffering of the Japanese. This shaped and was shaped by the commonly accepted

narrative of the war where the Japanese people themselves were victims who had

been involved in unjust war by their leaders (Gluck, 1993, 83). Along with an

emphasis of the Japanese as victims, there was a de-emphasis on the war in China

and South-East Asia.

The long running textbook controversy in Japan illustrates the role of the first

two custodians. The most famous example of this is Ienaga Saburō and the lawsuits

he launched challenging the textbook screening system imposed by the Japanese

8
Ministry of Education. Although immediate postwar highschool history textbooks

clearly assigned responsibility for the war to Imperial Japan (Ienaga, 1968, 255), with

the shifting political climate of the cold war, conservative politicians passed a law that

enabled the Ministry of Education to screen textbooks (Nozaki and Inokuchi, 2000,

104). Throughout the 1950s, Ienaga submitted his textbook, Shin Nihonshi, to the

screening process and was forced to make hundreds of changes to the text.

By the time conservative bureaucrats using the screening system refused

Ienaga’s textbook in 1963, Ienaga had concluded that the “screening was a form of

censorship” (Nozaki and Inokuchi, 2000,107). The reasons for rejection were vague;

according to Ienaga, the main reason given for refusal was that the book was “too

gloomy on the whole” (Ienaga, 1968, 255-6). During his first lawsuit trial, the

government elaborated its reasons for refusal:

Certain phrases such as “The war was glorified as a ‘holy cause,’ ”

“atrocities by Japanese troops” “reckless war” were objectionable

because “These are excessively critical of Japan’s position and actions

in World War II and do not give students a proper understanding of this

country’s position and actions in the war.” (Ienaga, 1968, 256)

Not only did Ienaga have to contend with the institutional screening of his textbook,

but he also had deal with the institution of the courts. He filed three different lawsuits

and fought an ongoing legal battle for over 32 years with only partial success.

Ienaga’s ultimate goal was to have the textbook screening process declared

unconstitutional, and although he was not successful on that point, the court cases

did bring to light the screening process and made the Japanese more aware of the

9
issues of the war and how it should be represented in the education system. (Nozaki

and Inokuchi, 2000).

Like the progressive critics Gluck describes, Ienaga believed the reforms

introduced by the Occupation were of value to the Japanese people. Ienaga pursued

his court cases because he felt it was necessary to remember the horrors of war;

otherwise, history would repeat itself. Ienaga believed an informed Japanese public

could prevent Japan from following such a belligerent course again. Textbooks were

critical for forming a consciousness of war in all its brutality, because he feared that

the young people in Japan would form their memory of war from popular cultural

representations of history which he dismissed as romanticizing the war (1968, 254).

The idea that popular culture influences its audience has been common in

cultural and media studies. Theories such as mass culture, the Frankfurt School’s

cultural industry, structuralism, and semiology are all premised on the idea that

popular culture shapes its audience. Certainly, many producers of cultural products

would not create novels, films, TV programs, or any other culture products that

express a viewpoint if they did not believe they could persuade their audience in

some way. This idea holds enough common currency that a letter printed in the

Asahi Shimbun, translated and reprinted in Sensō: the Japanese Remember the

Pacific War (Gibney, 1995, 313-314)2, criticizes the creators of science fiction anime

for romanticizing war using much the same argument as Ienaga. Interestingly for

me, a rebuttal letter is also reprinted on page 314 which emphasizes that there are

anime which explore the consequences of war on the lives of the characters. The

2
This book prints a selection of some 300 letters of a total of 1100 concerning the war that were
printed in the Asahi Shimbun between 10 July 1986 and 29 August 1987.

10
second letter was written by an 18 year old who could be considered to be a member

of the post-postwar Gundam generation.

As an academic, Ienaga is not alone in suggesting that the youth of Japan

learn about war through popular culture. Watanabe (2001) begins with the premise

that “popular culture has become the dominant source of learning about wars” for

young people (2001,129), and he concludes that it may be through such cultural

forms as anime and manga that the Japanese will come to terms with its wartime

past (2001, 149).

As well, Gerow argues that most recent chapter in the textbook controversy,

initiated by Fujioka Nobakutsu and the Liberal View of History Study Group, owes as

much to narratives found in popular culture as it does to historical facts, particularly,

to the narratives of Japanese suffering during and after the war. He believes that

“the feelings on which the [Liberal View of History] campaign is based were

constructed in popular media, cinema, TV, and literature” (Gerow, 2000, 79). Gerow

analyzes Fujioka’s book, History Not Taught in Textbooks, as “a cultural, discursive,

or even literary text, one that intersects with a variety of other texts, from the

historical to the fictional, from the printed to the televisual” (2000, 77) to understand

the new textbook revisionism.

The analysis of war narratives in popular culture takes on added importance

with the impact of Fujioka’s group which led the 2001 publication of a conservative

history textbook for junior high school students by the Society for History Textbook

Reform. Although this text was adopted by only 0.1 percent of Japanese junior high

schools (Morris-Suzuki, 2005, 9), a definite shift has occurred in all the approved

11
textbooks. Onishi (2005a) notes some of the changes between textbooks from

1997, 2001, and 2005:

About Asian women forced to serve as sex slaves for Japan’s wartime

military, euphemistically called “comfort women,” three out of eight

history textbooks used the term “comfort women” or “comfort facilities”

in the 2001 textbooks, and seven out of seven before that. This time,

only one does while the others refer to them even more vaguely.

He goes on to note a similar shift in the textbooks discussion of Asian forced

labourers during the war and the Nanjing massacre. Ienaga would not be pleased.

Clearly there is a need to go beyond textbooks and look at images of the past framed

by popular culture as argued by Morris-Suzuki (2005, 15).

Narrative and Popular Culture

In order to discuss narratives of war in Japanese popular culture I first want to

look at how the American Occupation from 1945 until 1952 defined and limited the

expression such narratives. Secondly I want to summarize some of the scholarly

work that has been done in the area of memory of war as expressed in popular

culture.

During the Occupation, the Supreme Command of Allied Powers (SCAP)

placed restrictions on the representation and discussion of the war. Dower

describes in detail the censorship apparatus, known as the Civil Censorship

Detachment (CCD), noting the massive effort involved at its height: over 6000

people worked for the CCD, and the division within the CCD responsible for

censoring the mass media examined on average 26 000 issues of newspapers, 4000

12
magazine issues, 23 000 radio scripts, and 1800 books and pamphlets each month

(1999, 407). The CCD had a key log of restricted topics that were not to be

discussed in the media; included on this list were such things as criticism of any of

the Allied Powers or the Occupation authorities, glorification of militarism, justification

of Imperial Japan’s actions before and during the war, and justification or defence of

war criminals (Dower, 1999, 411). Although not explicitly prohibited by the CCD,

photographs and films depicting the destruction and casualties wrought by the atomic

bomb were suppressed (Hirano, 1996), and even writing about the atomic bomb

experience became taboo through a mix of formal censorship and self-censorship by

publishers (Dower, 1999, 414). In her summary of the film censorship regime during

the Occupation, Hirano states the atomic bombings had to be portrayed as a

strategic measure that saved both Allied and Japanese lives (1996, 104). Under this

censorship regime, coming to terms with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

mourning and memorialization of the soldiers who had died fighting, even discussion

and debate of the political responsibility of the Japanese government for the war all

became highly problematic.

During the occupation period, there could only be limited expressions of

wartime experience in film and literature. Images of wartime destruction by Allied

forces was prohibited in film and even spoken references could be censored (Hirano,

1996, 106). Even so, the late 1940s saw the emergence of some of the earliest

examples of what became known as ‘A-bomb literature’--particularly The Bells of

Nagasaki3. The Occupation also saw the publication of collections of letters by

soldiers who had died in the war, the most famous being Kike–Wadatuni no Koe

3
Published with a description of the Bataan death march in the same volume. A strategy used in
films as well where the censors insisted that reference to Japanese war responsibility be included
with any reference to devastation (Hirano,1996,106).

13
(Listen–the voices of the sea) from 1948. From 1950 was also the period that the

husband and wife artists, Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi began to create their mural

series portraying the horror of the atomic bomb’s aftermath. Such early cultural

representations of the war as these helped establish the pattern of emphasizing the

suffering of the Japanese as a primary narrative of the war. The Japanese peace

movement put this suffering at the centre of its efforts because the victimization of

the Japanese, particularly the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings,

provided a moral gravity for the movement (Dower, 1996, 136).

The censorship combined with the decision by the Americans to keep the

emperor Hirohito on the throne allowed for a simplification and a polarization of the

memory of the war, particularly the debate over the responsibility for the war which

has continued to the present. On the one hand, those who questioned the premise

that Japan was entirely responsible for the war were almost completely silenced by

the Occupation censorship. Because of the apparent hypocrisy of this censorship

during the democratization of Japan which included an emphasis on freedom of

speech (Dower, 1999, 409), neo-nationalist rightists in Japan, such as Fujioka, have

been allowed a certain justification or righteousness to completely deny any

responsibility for the war. On the other hand, those who were willing to accept

responsibility for Japan’s actions in war, such as Gluck’s progressive critics, could

only argue in terms prescribed by the Occupation, which meant the Japanese

nation’s responsibility, particularly the emperor’s responsibility, could not be

examined in full. Those who accept responsibility for the war have been left open to

the attack that they are merely espousing a simplistic ‘Tokyo Trials’ view of history

which was imposed on Japan from the outside by America. By allowing the

14
emperor to remain on the throne, the Occupation endorsed the propaganda of the

post-surrender Japanese government that the emperor had been misled by the

military (Dower, 1996, 120). This ‘absolution’ of the emperor, who should have taken

responsibility since the entire war had been prosecuted in his name, encouraged

Japanese society not to reflect on its collective responsibility. The ‘reverse course’

policy of the late Occupation period compounded the problem because so many

politicians and bureaucrats who had been involved in the prosecution of the war once

again became active in the Japanese government. These people had a personal

stake in keeping silent on the issue of responsibility (even if they believed Japan was

responsible), since they had more to lose if the Japanese government openly

admitted responsibility for the war. Not only could political responsibility for the war

not be expressed, the general abhorrence for war that was shared by almost all

Japanese (Dower, 1999, 25) also limited expression, particularly public expression,

of the kind of nationalistic feelings that had led to the war even after the Occupation

had finished. Because mainstream popular culture and mass media tend to be

conservative and observe the status quo (Strinati, 2000, 206; Pharr, 1996, 9), this

had the impact of limiting the representation of the war, particularly the political

responsibility for war, in mainstream cultural products such as television programs

and popular movies.

There have been a number of studies that have dealt with memory of war as

represented in popular culture in Japan. Igarashi (2001) argues that in many ways

popular culture became the place to express Japanese nationalism in the postwar

period since it could not be adequately expressed in the political sphere. He argues

that a sense of loss due to the trauma of war and defeat is reflected widely across

15
and deeply within Japanese popular culture. Choosing to limit himself to the 25 years

after the end of the war, he particularly emphasizes bodily metaphors in what he

describes as “the expression and repression of the past” as Japan tried to come to

terms with its memory of the war and defeat.

Interestingly, one of Igarashi’s premises is that popular culture produced

highbrow cultural discourses (not normally associated with popular culture), and he

examines in detail the Godzilla monster movies (2001, 114-122) and the professional

wrestler Rikidōzan (2001,122-129), both seemingly lowbrow cultural products from

the 1950s. In Igarashi’s interpretation though, Godzilla is symbolic of both losses

suffered by Japan during the war and of the United States which inflicted those

losses. With the postwar recovery erasing physical reminders of the war, Godzilla

returns to destroy the cities of Japan once again in scenes reminiscent of the wartime

air raids. As well, Rikidōzan represented several different narratives of Japanese

war memory in Igarashi’s analysis. The simple good versus evil storyline of his

wrestling matches against American wrestlers echoed wartime propaganda of Japan

versus the Western powers that had colonized Asia. By coming out victorious,

Rikidōzan allowed the Japanese spectator to vicariously experience victory instead of

the humiliation of defeat. This allowed an expression of Japanese nationalism

through sport.

However, Igarashi shows that Rikidōzan presented a more complicated

message. Rikidōzan was symbolic of a new Japan that discarded the old Japan that

had been defeated in the war. Not only did Rikidōzan defeat Americans at their own

game, he did so without the help of other Japanese pro wrestlers who had come from

traditional Japanese martial arts, judo and sumo. In Rikidōzan’s first set of tag-team

16
matches against American opponents, his partner Kimura Masahiko, who had been a

former judo champion, had to be repeatedly rescued by Rikidōzan. Rikidōzan later

went on to defeat Kimura in a wrestling match. Later, in 1955, Rikidōzan was

teamed up with a former sumo yokuzuna (grand champion), Azumafuji. Azumafuji,

like Kimura before him, often had to be rescued by Rikidōzan in matches against

American wrestlers. Ironically, not only did the traditional Japanese past of prewar

Japan have to be erased, but Rikidōzan’s personal history also had to be erased. He

had come to Japan from Korea in 1940, yet his public persona was that he was from

Kyushu. Whether intentional or not, Rikidōzan himself was symbolic of Japan’s

desire to forget its colonial past.

In another major study, Standish (2000) argues that the archetypal narrative of

the ‘tragic hero’, as exemplified by the story of Chushingura (47 loyal retainers),

provided a narrative that postwar film-makers used to explain the trauma of war and

defeat. According to Standish, following the Tokyo War Crime Trials:

the 'tragic hero' mythic form took on new life as emblematic of (a)

Japan's purity of spirit - expressed through a willingness to die for a

cause; and (b) through the allegoric meaning of death which

increasingly became encoded as victimisation and not, as previously,

sacrifice. (2000, 3)

This mythic narrative allowed the Japanese to interpret the events of the war in such

a way as to clear themselves of guilt and blame. Standish interprets a number of

different Japanese films from the wartime through the postwar including wartime

propaganda films, postwar films portraying kamikaze pilots, hibakusha films, and

yakuza films from the 1960s. Of particular interest is Standish’s interpretation of

17
Ningen no Jōken (The Human Condition) a well known series of 3 films from 1959-

60. The films follow the central character, Kaji, through his experiences during the

war in Japanese occupied Manchuria and in a Soviet labour camp following the war.

Although The Human Condition is an anti-war statement that does not glorify death in

anyway and shows everyone as both victim and perpetrator at the same time,

Standish indicts the film as advancing a world view where individuals have no power

to change the circumstances of life (2000, 141). Because the characters are locked

into roles by the power relations of the situations they find themselves in, this

“[legitimizes] the position of the majority [of Japanese people] who in wartime often

compromised their ideals for the perceived greater good” (Standish, 2000, 141). This

interpretation emphasizes the victim consciousness of the Japanese.

Japanese war films of the 1950s, particularly those dealing with the atomic

bombing, expressed this victim consciousness through a tragic and elegaic quality

known as mono no aware which the film critic Donald Richie defined as a

“sympathetic sadness” where one thinks:

This happened ; it is all over and finished, but isn’t it too bad? Still the

world is a transient place and this too is sad; what we feel today we

forget tomorrow, this is not as it perhaps should be, but it is as it is.

(1996, 22)

This feeling of mono no aware is a natural feeling that is effective in coping with

natural disasters, and for the Japanese the atomic bombs and the war in general,

perhaps unhealthily (Watanabe, 2001, 130), were looked upon as something very

close to a natural disaster.

18
 This sense of the atomic bombs as a natural disaster can be found in the

Japanese monster film genre which began with Godzilla (Gojira) from 1954. In the

case of Godzilla, a prehistoric monster is awakened by American nuclear test

explosions conducted in the South Pacific. Through the actions of mankind, the

power of nature is unleashed. These films, particularly those featuring the monster

Godzilla, were intended as statements about the war and about postwar society, and

Noriega argues that they are “a self conscious attempt to deal with nuclear history

and its effect on Japanese society” (1996,54). In Noriega’s analysis, the symbolism

of Godzilla has changed over time with the monster being symbolic of the atomic

bomb, the United States, Japan, or even capitalism and industrialism depending on

the film.

Not every representation of history in popular culture emphasizes the victim

consciousness, Nakar (2003) argues that the majority of war-themed manga created

from the late 1950s until the late 1960s actually created narratives of (limited) victory

rather than of victimization. Nakar finds that the majority of manga set during the

war told stories of pilots bravely fighting a losing battle at the end of the war (2003,

67). He shows these stories followed a mythic narrative of a tragic hero (much the

same as defined by Standish except with an emphasis on sacrifice) who acts as a

defender of his homeland. This mythic narrative is shown to echo much of the

reevaluation of Japan’s wartime experience that occurred during the 1960s (2003,

73). These manga avoided representation of the responsibility of Japan as a nation

in two ways. First, the stories focused on junior officers who were expected to follow

orders rather than the superior officers who issued those orders (Nakar, 2003, 69).

Second, most the manga were able to sidestep the issue of the war against China

19
because they focused on the aerial war which was chiefly against the United States.

The colonialism of the West and the atrocities of the United States, particularly the

strategic bombing campaign that culminated in the atomic bombings, showed the

reader that the battles the hero fought were just.

Tachibana (1998) examines how postwar writers in Germany and Japan dealt

with issues of guilt, responsibility, and memory. She is interested in authors who

provide what she calls a “counter-memory” to mainstream historical narratives. She

divides the postwar literature of each country into three stages which historical

narratives become increasingly wider in perspective. She describes the third stage

as one where

writers attempted to demonstrate that Hiroshima and Auschwitz were

neither one-time events nor the problem of the participant nations

alone, but instead belonged to all of humankind. In these more recent

narratives, wartime history is no longer recreated from the relatively

localized perspective of either victims or the guilty, but is interpreted

from the perspective of the responsibility of each and every individual

(1998, 8)

She also posits that at this third stage “history is a collection of subjective

experiences that can be rewritten and reinterpreted from the perspective of a distant

place”, giving as examples America or ancient Troy (1998, 9). This third stage can

apply to other cultural productions that feature a narrative including films, theatrical

plays, television programs, comics, and even video games.

For examining the intersection of popular culture and historical memory,

Morris-Suzuki’s Past Within Us (2005) provides a useful toolkit of ideas for thinking

20
about memory and history. She highlights the relationship between history as

identification and history as interpretation. The former being usually associated more

with ideas such as memory, heritage, and politics, and the latter usually with

academic history. She also argues that different media are suited to examining

history and memory in different ways and that the “consumer” (reader, viewer) should

be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of a medium for either interpretation or

identification (2005, 22-24).

Morris-Suzuki also makes an important distinction between ‘historical

responsibility’ which she limits to the direct legal and moral responsibility for acts

committed in the past and ‘implication in the past’ which she defines in two parts.

Firstly, people born after the occurrence of “historical acts of violence or oppression

are often beneficiaries of the results of those actions” (2005, 26) even if they are in

no way directly responsible for those acts. Secondly, speaking very broadly, Morris-

Suzuki asserts that we are all implicated in the past because the ideas, events,

institutions, and people of the past have affected the present that we live in and that

we (our values and beliefs) have been shaped by them. For her, popular culture is

an important means by which all this is communicated (2005, 27).

Another important distinction that Morris-Suzuki makes is that between

‘historical truth’ and ‘historical truthfulness’. For Morris-Suzuki, historical truth is

about the accuracy of historical facts, as opposed to historical truthfulness which is

about the relationship people have with the past and “the processes by which people

. . . try to make sense of the past” (2005,27). An example of historical truth versus

historical truthfulness may be the debate over the Nanjing Massacre (Incident). The

historical truth debate focuses on the number of dead and whether or not those killed

21
were killed illegally or legally. Some of the discrepancy between estimates comes

from differing definitions of the event in length of time and geographical space

(Askew, 2002). However, historical truthfulness would be more concerned with why

most Chinese people believe 300 000 people were massacred and why most

Japanese believe the number to be much lower including some who argue that there

was no massacre.

At its simplest, historical truthfulness with respect to popular culture is about

the relationship between a story about an historical event, the storyteller and the

audience. In looking at historical novels, Morris-Suzuki is less concerned with “is it

true?” than with examining:

• why does the writer want to write about the novel’s historical events?

• why does the reader want to read about these events?

• what historical events, places, and people are missing from this telling?

• How does this telling influence the reader’s perception of history?

(Morris-Suzuki, 2005, 61)

These are all interesting questions and applicable to any representation of history in

any media. Clearly examining historical truthfulness can be very demanding.

Anime and War

Anime depictions of war tend to fall into three categories according to Drazen:

• real wars that Japan was involved in,

• fictional battles involving Japan (past, present or future), and

• battles with little or no connection to Earth (2003, 192).

22
Each succeeding category provides greater emotional distance, allowing the viewer to

choose which side to identify with (Drazen, 2003, 192).

Most anime that depict the Asia-Pacific war focus on the impact of the war on

non-combatants, particularly children. These anime emphasize the suffering of the

Japanese populace and the enemy is often faceless, a trope carried over from

Japanese war-time films (Dower, 1993, 39-45). The film Tsushima Maru: Sayonara

Okinawa tells the story of the sinking of an evacuation ship carrying school children

from Okinawa; of the 826 children aboard only 59 survived. The only image of the

American submarine that sinks the Tsushima Maru is the wake of its torpedoes

before they strike. The viewer has no choice but to identify with the suffering of the

protagonists. Famous anime such as Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no Haka) and

Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen) also emphasize the victim’s consciousness, though

Napier (2000, 157-173) demonstrates a fundamental difference in how each film

depicts victimization with “Grave of the Fireflies . . . [embodying] a nightmarish vision

of passivity and despair while Barefoot Gen has at its core an indomitable spirit of

resistance and renewal” (Napier, 2000, 163). While Grave of the Fireflies accepts

victimization consciousness, Barefoot Gen rejects it.

In Drazen’s second and third categories, there is very little academic

scholarship concerning anime and war. What there is tends to focus on either

alternative retellings of the war or how the apocalypse is represented. Napier (2005)

examines Uchuu Senkan Yamato and argues that it “defamiliarizes the war

experience, allowing not only a working through of the trauma of defeat (through

innumerable repetitions of attack and destruction) but ultimately a reworking of the

defeat.” In her reading, the Yamato becomes a symbol of peace and love for not just

23
Japan, but for the entire world. While Frieberg (1996) examines the feature film

anime Akira as a vision of the post-apocalypse, contrasting it with western

conceptions of the apocalypse which is about the end of the world. In the West, the

apocalypse is unimaginable, inconceivable, unrepresentable (Frieberg, 1996. 95).

However, in part because Japan has been the only nation to suffer nuclear

destruction, she concludes that Akira is a variation on Japan’s modernization

narrative as described by Wolfe. The Japanese modernization includes an element

of cyclical destruction and rebirth: the narrative of the end of the world is how to

survive and rebuild after it occurs (Wolfe, 1989, 229-230). A narrative shared by

Barefoot Gen.

Citing Gundam and Macross among others, Crawford dismisses robot warfare

anime as consisting of a “romanticized image of war” (1996, 80) and as relishing in

the effects of war and brutal violence (1996, 82), and he cites Uchuu Senkan Yamato

in particular as an example of overt nostalgia for the Pacific war (1996, 82). He

argues that a subtext of suicide and violence in anime undermines any overt

message of peace (1996,90). Crawford’s argument essentially inverts the arguments

of cyclical death and rebirth focusing on death and destruction rather than rebirth and

regeneration.

Why Gundam?

On one hand we have a need to look at images of the past framed by popular

culture (Morris-Suzuki, 2005, 15). On the other hand, Japanese popular culture has

shied away from presenting images of both the battlefield and the politics of the

period, focusing only on the suffering of ordinary Japanese. For a number of

24
reasons, Gundam offers an interesting example of popular culture that may give a

meaningful view of Japan’s relationship with the past. First of all, it is intended to be

about Japan’s wartime past. Secondly, it is science fiction. Finally, I believe that is

has become a genre.

Coming back to Drazen’s three categories of war depictions, Gundam falls

between the second and third categories. The war central to Gundam’s narrative is a

world war where the definition of the world has been expanded to include not only the

Earth but also space colonies on the moon and in space stations orbiting the Earth.

Aliens and other common science fiction devices such as faster than light travel are

absent creating a very plausible and human world (Vernal, 1995, 60). Gundam has

been described as a “celebration of advanced technology and hegemonic warfare”

(Napier, 1996, 7). Whether it is fair to say that Gundam is a celebration is

debatable, but it is undoubtedly about hegemonic warfare. The creator of Gundam,

Tomino Yoshiyuki, has stated that the first Gundam series was about World War II in

at least one interview (Sponichi Annex, 2005, 3). David Vernal, who conducted an

interview with Tomino as part of his research, states that:

Tomino identifies factors such as miscommunication and obedience to

ideology–both part of the Japanese conception of WWII–as causes of

war, and develops them as themes that run through the various

Gundam series (1995, 60).

Ashbaugh (2004) sees Gundam, particularly the first series, as an allegory for World

War II and argues that it is a critique of both the tragic hero narrative and the victim’s

history found in Japan. As a program intended for older children or adolescents,

Tomino did not want to create a program that condescended to its audience,

25
something he felt was a common problem with many anime programs that he had

worked on previously. Tomino uses Gundam as means to teach about “the role of

the individual and the nature of the enemy in wartime” and he insists on the

connection between the real world and the fictional world of Gundam (Vernal, 1995,

57).

As a science fiction program, Gundam can avoid controversy (and possibly the

issue of responsibility) that other more direct representations cannot. Morris-Suzuki

(2005, 168) notes that historical comics have been used to address contemporary

issues critically in a way that avoids censorship. Science fiction can serve a similar

function: science fiction stories are really about the present not some imagined future

(Jameson, 1983,151, quoted in Frieberg, 1996, 96). Representations of history that

are too critical of Japan’s role during the war even now run the risk of censorship.

The manga “Kuni ga Moeru” (“The Country is Burning”), running in a weekly comic

magazine, was suspended by its publisher in late October 2004 because it “had

described Japanese soldiers massacring civilians in Nanjing” in two issues from

September 2004 (Japan Times, 2004). Local politicians were reported as having

protested to the publisher that the story distorted history by presenting the massacre

“as if it really happened.” These politicians were also reported to have held the

opinion that “there is strong evidence that the massacre never happened and that

there is no proof that it did.” The manga was censored in particular because it made

the mistake of referring to a photo of doubtful authenticity regarding the Nanjing

Massacre in a single panel, yet 21 pages of the manga were to be deleted or

modified by the publisher when the manga was published in book form (Japan Times

26
Weekly, 2004).4 As science fiction, Gundam is not constrained by the historical truth

of particular events, but the historical truthfulness can still be examined.

If we think of Gundam as a genre, the changes in Gundam over time may

reflect changes in society’s narratives of the war. Strinati (2000, 43), in summarizing

arguments for studying film and television genres, says that if genres are thought of

as a process, “it suggests they change , are part of wider social changes, and are

subject to the meanings constructed and circulated by producers and audiences.” A

genre can be viewed as “a concrete and specific historically variable, social

construction” (Strinati, 2000, 202). In other words, a genre can tell something about

society because of its nature. Television genres are commodities “manufactured for

and . . . dependent on public consumption and support”, and “genres with mass

audience appeal” are favoured for the production of television programs (Rose,

1985, 5-7, quoted by Strinati, 2000, 205-206). A large supportive audience is

necessary for a television program, because it is the advertisers who pay for the

production of the program. Because of this need for advertising in television, genres

tend to be conservative in character and do not question the status quo much

(Strinati, 2000, 206). I intend to show that Gundam can be defined as a genre, and I

think it reflects a mainstream narrative that does not examine specific issues of

political responsibility yet is generally critical of war. I will also argue that Gundam is

the anime heir of pilot manga described by Nakar (2003) and Morris-Suzuki (2005,

177) but that Gundam acts as a counter-memory to the conservative ‘tragic hero’

narrative of those manga.

4
On the other hand Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensō Ron has been a great success selling hundreds of
thousands of copies even though it would deny (obliterate the past in Morris-Suzuki’s words) any
wrongdoing in the forced prostitution of the ‘comfort women’, because there is no conclusive
documentary evidence. Meanwhile Kobayashi ignores the testimony of women who were involved
and any corroborating documentary evidence (Ueno, 1999, 134).

27
Main Body

Gundam as a Genre

If we accept that genres can tell us something meaningful about society, then

my next task is to show how Gundam can be thought of as a genre or at least the

representative example of the ‘real robot’ genre in anime. As a first step, I’d like to

show the extent of the various Gundam series. Table 1 is a summary of most of the

major Gundam television series, original animation videos (OAV) that are released

direct to video, and feature films. It is not an exhaustive list but only excludes most

OAVs and feature films that consist mainly of footage recycled from a television

series. I have used the title of each work as it is commonly given in English.

Table 1.
Date Full Title Media # of Comment
episodes

1979-1980 Mobile Suit Gundam * TV 43 Dir. Tomino Yoshiyuki

1981 Mobile Suit Gundam I Feature Film Compilation movie

1981 Mobile Suit Gundam II: Film Compilation movie; 30%

Soldiers of Sorrow new footage

1982 Mobile Suit Gundam III: Film Compilation movie; 70%

Encounters in Space new footage

1985-1986 Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam * TV 50 Dir. Tomino Yoshiyuki

1986-1987 Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ TV 47 Dir. Tomino Yoshiyuki

1988 Mobile Suit Gundam: Film Dir. Tomino Yoshiyuki

Char’s Counterattack *

1989 Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: OAV 6

War in the Pocket *

1991 Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: OAV 13

Stardust Memory *

1991 Mobile Suit Gundam F91 Film Originally planned as a

TV series

1993-1994 Mobile Suit Victory Gundam TV 51 Dir. Tomino Yoshiyuki

1994-1995 Mobile Fighter G Gundam TV 49 (50) Prologue episode

alternate universe

28
 Date Full Title Media # of Comment
episodes

1995-1996 New Mobile War Report Gundam TV 49 alternate universe

Wing *

1996 After War Gundam X TV 39 alternate universe

low ratings

1996-1999 Mobile Suit Gundam: OAV 12

The 08th MS Team *

1998 New Mobile War Report Gundam Feature film Compilation of a

Wing : Endless Waltz Gundam Wing OAV with
added footage

1999-2000 “Turn A” Gundam TV 50 20th anniversary show

Dir. Tomino Yoshiyuki

2002-2003 Mobile Suit Gundam SEED * TV 50

2003-2005 SD Gundam Force TV 52 children’s Gundam

“Super Deformed”

2004-2005 Mobile Suit Gundam SEED TV 50 (51) Special final episode

Destiny

2005 MS IGLOO Short Films 3 Not released theatrically,

but part of a museum
exhibit to celebrate
Gundam’s 25th
anniversary

2006 MS IGLOO: Apocalypse 0079 OAV 3

* Entries viewed for this study.

Strinati summarizes a number of useful ideas regarding genres. First of all,

genres are products, manufactured for consumers, and must make a profit (Rose,

1985, 5 quoted by Strinati, 2000, 45). In order to make a profit, producers create

products that balance familiarity and novelty (Neale , Buscombe as cited by Strinati,

2000, 44). Genres can be “profitable because they offer a way of linking

differentiation with standardised formats” (Strinati, 2000, 44). Genres develop over

time because of the success of previous products; successful products inspire similar

products by other producers which leads to standardization. They can change over

time but the possible changes are limited by “production, consumption, narrative, and

ideology” (Strinati, 2000, 45). A final idea that Strinati mentions is verisimilitude

29
which Neale briefly defines as “a concept which focuses on audience expectations

and textual norms”(2000, 2). Verisimilitude can divided into two main types: generic

verisimilitude and cultural verisimilitude. Generic verisimilitude “refers to a work that

conforms to the rules and conventions of the genre” while cultural verisimilitude

refers to a work that conforms to what the audience believes is “true and appropriate

in the society and culture which surrounds them” (Strinati, 2000, 42-43).

Like all commercial animation, Gundam has an industrial mode of production

like any mass-produced product; there are scores of people involved in the creation

of a single episode of animation, each with their own specialized tasks. The very

quantity of Gundam anime that has been produced suggests that Gundam has been

profitable. However, a brief history of the first television series, Mobile Suit Gundam,

and the compilation movies made from it may help illustrate Gundam’s status as a

genre.

The creator of Gundam, Tomino Yoshiyuki, was a successful anime director

in 1970s, often working on programs of the ‘super robot’ genre. Super robot

programs featured fantastic, giant, super-powered humanoid robots that were often

semi-sentient. These programs were generally funded by toy companies and often

acted as extended length toy commercials.

In 1979, Tomino was given the opportunity to create a new super robot anime.

While keeping a number of the super robot narrative conventions intact, Tomino

changed a number important details. In the super robot genre, the protagonist

usually pilots the robot and is often the adolescent son of the super robot’s creator.

The robot itself features superpowers and often has fantastical weapons. The story

structure is usually episodic with a black versus white superhero narrative often

30
featuring the ‘monster of the week’. Tomino kept the Gundam protagonist much the

same: Amuro Ray is the teenaged son of the engineer who designed the Gundam

mobile suit. The Gundam itself was also a brightly coloured giant robot featuring a

wide variety of weapons. However, the changes were significant: Mobile Suit

Gundam presented a serialized story with the Gundam being a manufactured

weapon of war requiring maintenance rather than a superhero.

Because of these changes, particularly the more complex storyline dealing

with the moral ambiguity of war, Mobile Suit Gundam was cancelled before

completing its entire run, demonstrating the difficulty of change in a genre. After the

series was cancelled, Bandai, a toy company, acquired the rights to make plastic

models based on the series, and the models were extremely successful and are still

today (Uranaka, 2003; Mainichi Daily News, 2006). With the success of the model

series and of Tomino’s follow up project to Mobile Suit Gundam, the production

studio, Sunrise, let Tomino create a feature film version of the television series that

was closer to his original artistic vision (Anime Academy, 2006). The success of the

feature films combined with a number other popular anime series that featured more

plausible robots helped create the new ‘real robot’ genre. Gundam remains as an

archetype of the genre.

The original Mobile Suit Gundam was not successful in part because it

challenged the expectations of the super robot audience: it was outside “the narrow

limits of familiarity” of the genre (Rose, 1985, 6, as quoted by Strinati, 2000, 207).

The success of Bandai’s models had a significant impact on the development of the

new genre. Bandai’s models were highly detailed, and Machiyama asserts that the

purchasers the model kits were mostly fans of plastic models, especially fans of

31
military models (2004, 73). To appeal to this market segment interested in military

models, Gundam and other real robot anime, such as Macross and Patlabor,

depend upon the generic verisimilitude of robots that are plausibly high tech pieces of

hardware, usually military hardware. To maintain generic verisimilitude, some of

the identifying features of the Gundam real robots (mobile suits) are:

• Mobile suits are industrial machines and are manufactured by nations and

commercial enterprises.

• They can be prototypes or mass produced.

• Mobile suits use scaled up versions of human weapons

such as lasers, rifles, swords, knives, and shields. See

Figure 1.

• Mobile suits use mostly ranged weapons that require

ammunition.

• Mobile suits require periodic maintenance.

• Mobile suits do not have limitless fuel or power supplies Figure 1 - The original

Gundam
(Wikipedia, 2006).

Also each new Gundam series requires the introduction of

multiple new mobile suits that can be marketed and sold to the

plastic model fans.

Generic verisimilitude also requires the story to follow the

narrative conventions of the genre. Since the original Mobile Suit

Gundam is a war story that takes place on the battlefield, it

borrowed a number of its narrative conventions from the pilot manga described by

Nakar (2003). In the pilot manga, the pilots were usually depicted as being as being

32
youths even appearing to be school boys (Nakar, 2003, 68); in Mobile Suit Gundam,

the pilot of the Gundam is usually young, if not an adolescent. Nakar argues that

pilot manga always showed the protagonist as being “in the role of defender rather

than aggressor” (2003, 68); the same is true of the Gundam pilots. The Japanese

word mamoru meaning to defend or to protect is commonly heard in Gundam.

Finally, Nakar notes that the heroes of the pilot manga were always junior officers

and that their superiors were often portrayed as cruel, overbearing, foolish or even

corrupt (2003,69); this too is a common theme in Gundam.

Of course, not only must Gundam possess generic verisimilitude, it must also

have cultural verisimilitude. Unlike pilot manga, Gundam, especially the television

series, is more constrained by the general anti-war sentiment of the Japanese public,

because a television program has a wider audience than a manga. As a battlefield

drama Gundam needs to express an overt anti-war sentiment throughout the story. It

does so by focusing on the personal dilemmas, conflicts, and motivations of the each

individual characters as they fight.

Narrative Conventions

As established by Mobile Suit Gundam there are a number narrative

conventions that the audience expects when watching a Gundam series. This is

particularly true of the various television series. It will be useful to summarize a few

of the conventions that Gundam follows by providing a brief synopsis of Mobile Suit

Gundam followed by an explanation of some of the archetypal tropes found in

Gundam.

33
 The first episode starts with a prologue that explains the backstory. Most of

humanity is living in space colonies in Earth orbit. Tensions between the colonies

and the Earthbound government (the Earth Federation) led to a single cluster of

colonies (Zeon) declaring its independence from Earth. War eventually broke out

between Zeon and the Earth Federation. There were massive casualties especially

on the Earth after Zeon dropped an empty space colony from orbit onto the Earth.

The prologue concludes by saying the war is at a stalemate. Although not mentioned

in the prologue, Zeon is supposed to have a significant tactical advantage in combat

because it has mobile suits and the Earth Federation forces do not.

The story begins with a surprise (and unauthorized) attack by a Zeon

reconnaissance team on an Earth Federation space colony, L7. The Zeons attack

because they discover a new Federation secret weapon, the prototype mobile suit

Gundam, at L7. A young civilian, the protagonist Amuro Ray, is unexpectedly able to

pilot the Gundam, and he battles the Zeon mobile suits in order to protect his friends.

The story continues with Amuro escaping the space colony aboard the White Base (a

Federation forces Mobile Suit Carrier). The space colony was destroyed during the

Zeon attack, and the White Base is crewed by a mix of junior officers and refugees

from the colony. The first story arc follows the White Base as it tries to make it to the

safety of a Federation base and then the Earth while being pursued by a Zeon force

commanded by Char Aznable. Char is depicted as an ace mobile suit pilot and

experienced commander who inexplicably cannot sink the White Base with its ragtag

crew and inexperienced mobile suit pilot.

In episode 5, the White Base returns to the Earth, landing in Zeon controlled

territory, and the ship on the run narrative continuous. Sometimes Char is the

34
hunter, sometimes another Zeon commander is. As the White Base flees the Zeon,

there are several character developments. Amuro struggles with his responsibility as

the primary defender of the White Base. A member of the White Base crew, Sayla

Mass, is revealed to be Char Aznable’s sister. More of the political backstory is

revealed with the rulers of Zeon, Degwin Zabi and his family, being portrayed as

autocrats who seized power from and most likely assassinated Char’s father. Char,

who is using an assumed name, is shown to be seeking revenge against the Zabi

family.

By episode 29, The White Base has eventually made it safely to the

Federation forces main base, and the tide of war has turned against Zeon with the

introduction of mass produced mobile suits based on the Gundam prototype. The

final story arc finds the White Base with the Gundam returning to space for the final

push against the Zeon forces. There are a number of battles in space with mass

casualties on both sides. The character Lalah Sune is introduced to create a love

triangle between her, Char, and Amuro. Her death in battle at Amuro’s hand creates

character motivations for Char and Amuro in later Gundam sequels.

As the series closes out, Degwin Zabi, the Zeon head of state, is shown to be

in a state of grief due to the death of his youngest son who was killed in battle with

the White Base during episode 10. With the death of his second son in battle,

Degwin decides to negotiate a cease-fire with the Federation forces. However

Degwin’s oldest son, who has been shown to be the one actually exercising power,

authorizes the use of a massive laser against the Federation fleet knowing that his

father’s ship is about to meet with the Federation flagship.

35
 Although much of the Federation fleet is destroyed, they press on for the final

battle. The Zabi family collapses with the daughter killing her brother because he

committed patricide. She in turn is killed by Char to complete his revenge. The

series concludes with the Federation forces in victory. Both the White Base and the

Gundam are destroyed, however the White Base crew survives, saved by Amuro.

In Gundam, as with pilot manga, the main protagonist is usually quite young.

It’s interesting to note that Stardust Memories and The 08th MS Team feature slightly

older protagonists; these are both more ‘realistic’ entries in the Gundam corpus.

Whereas the age of the protagonists in Mobile Suit Gundam, Gundam Wing, and

Gundam X show the roots of Gundam in the super robot genre. Mobile Suit Gundam

served as the bridge between the two genres, while Gundam Wing and Gundam X

were ‘re-imaginings’ of the original Gundam narrative in an attempt to broaden the

Gundam audience.

Table 2.
Title Main protagonist Age
Mobile Suit Gundam Amuro Ray 15
Zeta Gundam Kamille Bidan 17
Stardust Memories (OAV) Kou Uraki 19
Gundam Wing Heero Yuy 15
After War Gundam X Garrod Ran 15
The 08Th MS Team (OAV) Shiro Amada 24
Gundam SEED Kira Yamato 16

A fundamental difference between Gundam and the pilot manga is the

depiction of the enemy. The pilot manga follows the tradition of the phantom enemy

of Japanese war-time propaganda film: “the enemy is rarely seen, and still more

rarely presented as a developed character” (Nakar, 2003, 68). Nakar cites a

36
significant exception to this in the manga Shidenkai no Taka5 (The Hawk in the

Shidenkai Fighter) where the protagonist comes to realize the humanity of his

enemy. The manga author aids the reader in this discovery by having the American

pilots speak Japanese (using katakana). Gundam takes this further by presenting its

story from both sides, and the viewer is constantly reminded of the humanity of the

combatants. Gundam does this in a number of ways. Minor characters that may be

considered “cannon fodder” and that only have a few minutes of screen time in a

single episode are still called given names and relationships. A character may have

a brief scene sketching out or hinting at a friendship or romantic relationship or a

family photo might be prominently displayed in the character’s cockpit, before he or

she is killed off. As an example from Mobile Suit Gundam, Dozel Zabi, the second

son of Degwin Zabi, does not get much screen time during the series until the

episode where he dies. He is shown parting from his wife and infant daughter as

they are evacuated just before a Federation attack. He is resigned to a hopeless

defence of the Zeon base, because it is the life he has chosen as a soldier and a

member of the Zabi family. As he enters what is to be his final battle, his thoughts

go to his wife and daughter who he hopes have made it to safety. He even goes so

far as to allow his subordinates the option of remaining with him in the suicidal

defence of the base or leaving.

The chief antogonist, Char (pronounced syaa) Aznable, has become an

archetype in Gundam. Although chiefly portrayed as Amuro Ray’s nemesis, his

character goes through a complicated arc where he moves from being a villain

motivated by personal revenge in Mobile Suit Gundam, to being the mentor for the

5
In Gundam SEED, there is a possible allusion to the manga. An ace pilot known as the “Hawk of
Endymion” is a major character.

37
Zeta Gundam protagonist Kamille Bidan, to finally being a blind idealogue in Char’s

Counterattack capable of genocide if it serves what he considers the greater good.

Despite being a character with obvious flaws, or perhaps because of them, Char is a

fan favourite character, exemplified in particular by the potential space tourist,

Daisuke Enomoto, who stated his intension to dress as Char Aznable while aboard

the International Space Station (Mail&Guardian Online, 2005). As an archetype, the

Char character is portrayed as a career soldier who hides his identity by wearing a

mask covering his eyes and using an assumed name. As a commander, he is

depicted as being charismatic and inspiring loyalty in subordinates. Other Char-like

characters include Zechs Merquise from Gundam Wing and Rau Le Creuset from

Gundam SEED. Jamil Neate from Gundam X is similar to Char’s Quattro Bajeena

persona from Zeta Gundam, in that they both constantly wear sunglasses and act as

a mentor to the main protagonist.

Table 3.

Title Ship name

Mobile Suit Gundam White Base
Zeta Gundam Argama, Audhumla
Stardust Memories (OAV) Albion
After War Gundam X Freeden
Gundam SEED Archangel
A final narrative convention that is common across most Gundam television

series is “the lone ship on the run” narrative. In this convention, the mobile suit

carrier on which the Gundam is stationed is cut off from the normal command and

support of its military. The ship is usually in enemy territory and is being actively

hunted. In addition, the ship’s crew is typically inexperienced and short-staffed. An

38
exception to this is the Albion from Stardust Memories: the Albion is hunting a Zeon

force in Earth Federation territory rather than being hunted. However, its crew is

inexperienced and eventually it is declared an autonomous ship by the Earth

Federation high command and is essentially abandoned.

Study Methodology

For this study, I watched four Gundam television series, three Gundam OAVs,

and one feature film in their entirety, approximately 76 hours of video. All are easily

available at Japanese video shops. Each of the programs chosen are also available

in the United States on DVD, and as such, are not only the programs with the

possibly greatest commercial potential, but also are the only Gundam series with

subtitles for a non-native speaker of Japanese like myself.

Table 4.
Date Full Title Media # of Comment
episodes

1979-1980 Mobile Suit Gundam TV 43 Universal Century timeline

(UC0079)

1985-1986 Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam TV 50 Universal Century (UC0087)

1988 Mobile Suit Gundam: Film Universal Century (UC0093)

Char’s Counterattack

1989 Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: OAV 6 Universal Century (UC0079-80)

War in the Pocket

1991 Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: OAV 13 Universal Century (UC0083)

Stardust Memory

1995-1996 New Mobile War Report Gundam TV 49 After Colony timeline

Wing

1996-1999 Mobile Suit Gundam: OAV 12 Universal Century (UC0079)

The 08th MS Team

2002-2003 Mobile Suit Gundam SEED TV 50 Cosmic Era timeline

Fortunately, the series available with English offer a representative sample of

39
Gundam. I chose Mobile Suit Gundam, because as the first series, it defines the

conventions of the genre. Zeta Gundam is the first sequel and is considered one of

the darker entries in the Gundam corpus; it was also originally broadcast during 1985

which marked the 40th anniversary of Japan’s defeat. Char’s Counterattack provides

closure to the stories of Amuro Ray and particularly Char Aznable, and Char’s story

arc would later be echoed by Gundam Wing’s Zechs Merquise. Most Gundam

stories take place within the same fictional universe known as the Universal Century

(UC) timeline, much like all of Star Trek takes place within the same fictional

universe. War in the Pocket and The 08th MS Team are side stories that are

contemporaneous with Mobile Suit Gundam, while Stardust Memories provides a

back story that bridges between Mobile Suit Gundam and Zeta Gundam. These are

all OAVs which allow some challenging of the Gundam genre conventions.

Outside the UC timeline, Gundam Wing is one of three television programs

from 1994 through 1995 which were ‘re-imaginings’ of the original Gundam saga,

while 2002's Gundam SEED is essentially a retelling of the original Mobile Suit

Gundam. Gundam Wing was originally aired in 1995, 50 years after Japan’s defeat

and can be considered “an oddity, with the action switching between giant robots

blasting each other apart and talking heads debating the practicality of pacificism”

(Drazen, 2003, 203). Gundam SEED, despite following a narrative almost identical

to that of the original Mobile Suit Gundam, is the most popular series since Zeta

Gundam and is the first of the alternate timeline Gundam series to have its own

sequel television series.

For this study, I initially decided that I would attempt a content analysis of

Gundam series that I had selected, based on the premise that the changes in the

40
content over time would in someway reflect the changing memories of war. In order

to evaluate the content of Gundam, I created a prototype checklist, a ‘code sheet’,

which included a number of narrative elements (i.e. imagery or plot points) which I

felt reflected memory of war. I watched Gundam SEED and refined the code sheet,

adding items that seemed relevant as they appeared in the program. The final code

sheet can found in appendix A.

The code sheet ended up being divided into four major sections: images of

violence, images of destruction, images of the enemy, and issues of causation of and

responsibility for war. I also included a fifth section that acted as a catchall for other

relevant points that did not fit in with the other sections. For images of violence, I

focused on images where a character is shown as a victim (or perpetrator) of

violence. While for images of destruction, I focused on physical destruction including

what was destroyed (eg. military or civilian targets), how it was destroyed (eg.

nuclear or conventional weapons), and whether there were images showing the

consequences of the destruction (eg. refugees). Images of the enemy is more about

the attitudes held towards the enemy by characters on both sides of the conflict. The

causation and responsibility section was the most problematic in that it required the

most interpretation particularly about issues of responsibility.

I used a single code sheet for each 25 minute episode of anime6. If an image

that I was looking for occurred at least once, I checked the code sheet. It did not

matter if there was one or ten images in the episode. I did this in order to make the

amount of data generated manageable. In the case of a major or recurring character

as a victim of violence, I did note how many individual characters were victims and
6
The feature film Char’s Counterattack (CCA) was the one exception to this in that I used only two
code sheets for the film even though it is two hours long. Although I include the CCA code sheet
data in the totals, I will not directly compare CCA with the other installments in Gundam.

41
the nature of the violence for each character in each episode. My rationale for this is

that the emotional impact on the audience of violence towards a recurring character

is likely to be greater than that of violence towards minor or anonymous characters.

I had thought that by doing content analysis I would avoid the weaknesses

inherent in interpreting a text. A text like a television program usually has a preferred

reading encoded by the producers; However, since the audience does not

necessarily decode the preferred reading, there is no guarantee that my

interpretation is the preferred reading or that the audience will find the same

interpretation as me. With content analysis, there is a problem in that some

interpretation is necessary in order to select the content that is to be analyzed. Since

Gundam is a program that has been generally aimed at older children and

adolescents, I have tried to keep to a fairly literal reading of Gundam in the hope that

the preferred reading is the most obvious one. In the end, I decided to use the data I

have generated as examples to help support my interpretation, rather than doing any

statistical analysis of the data generated.

The Historical Truthfulness of Gundam

As already noted, Gundam is not constrained by particular historical ‘truths’,

because it is science fiction. Although connections can be made to particular events

and situations, Gundam uses these truths as raw materials to create a story that can

be told in approximately 50 episodes of television which is about 17 hours long. In

such a short time, simplification and compression is both unavoidable and necessary

in order to tell a meaningful coherent story.

If we keep in mind Morris-Suzuki’s idea of historical truthfulness, we need to

look at why the producers created the various Gundam series and told the stories

42
they did. We also need to examine the audience and why they watch the programs.

A third thing to consider is which historical events, places, and people are present in

this telling and which are absent. Morris-Suzuki’s final question to look at is how do

Gundam programs influence the viewer’s perception of history. I think it will be

useful to address these questions in reverse order, starting with the audience first,

then interpreting the contents of Gundam, and finally drawing some conclusions

about what the creators of Gundam, particularly Tomino, intended.

The Audience

To address the second and fourth points first, for the purpose of this study, the

Gundam audience is only myself. I chose to watch Gundam because I was

interested if there is a connection between war anime such as Gundam and the

memory of war in Japanese society. As such, my reactions to Gundam most likely

do not reflect those of most other Gundam viewers. To gain an understanding of the

influence of Gundam on the viewer’s perception of history would require at least one

of either an audience survey, a focus group discussion, or audience interviews. I

recognize that not having done any audience research is a major weakness of this

study; unfortunately, I felt that it was beyond what I was capable of at this time,

especially since before I had embarked on this I was not very familiar with Gundam.

I had only watched the three compilation movies of the original series.

Chandler (2002) conducted a small online survey of Gundam viewers

attempting to ascertain if Gundam had any influence on their political leanings but did

not find any compelling evidence that Gundam was an effective “ideological conduit.”

One other thing that I can note regarding the Gundam audience is the television

43
ratings for some of the various television series during their original run (Gunota

Headlines, 2004):

Program Average rating Highest Rating Year

Zeta Gundam 6.6% 11.7% 1985-86
Gundam Double Zeta 6.1% 8.6% 1986-87
Gundam SEED 6.1% 8.0% 2002-03
Gundam SEED DESTINY 5.4% 8.2% 2004-05
Mobile Suit Gundam 5.3% 9.9% 1979-80
Gundam Wing 4.3% 6.8% 1995-96
The remaining Gundam series had lower ratings than Gundam Wing. From these

figures, you can get a sense of the relative popularity of each series during its initial

run. Interestingly, data for some of the reruns of Mobile Suit Gundam are also

included in the article. In reruns, Mobile Suit Gundam received much higher ratings,

usually at least double its initial run with a high of 25% in the Nagoya region.

The Elements of the Story

However important the audience is, I am going to focus on the attempt to

influence memory rather than the influence itself. Which brings us to Morris-Suzuki’s

first point of why the teller is telling the story and her third point regarding the

historical events, people, and places present or absent in the telling. I will look at the

latter first. Various analogies can be made between the events of World War II

and events occurring in Gundam. Ashbaugh finds a clear allegory between Mobile

Suit Gundam and World War II with the Principality of Zeon playing the part of the

Axis powers and the Earth Federation the part of the Allies (2004, 8-9). Chandler

(2002) draws a connection between the OAV Stardust Memory from 1991 and the

44
Pacific War with the climatic battle being “an amalgam of Guadalcanal, Peal Harbor,

and Hiroshima.” Other examples include Zeon military personnel who prefer death to

capture in Mobile Suit Gundam and The 08th MS Team, military uniforms and a Zeon

national flag that are visually similar to those of Nazi Germany in Stardust Memory,

and Zeta Gundam’s “Titans” special forces who are portrayed mostly as brutal thugs

wearing black shirts. Since the Titans wear black uniforms much like the Nazi SS,

use poison gas like the Japanese Imperial Army, yet are a special division of the

Earth Federation Forces, who had played the part of the Allies in the first series, it

seems clear Gundam should be thought of as a historical pastiche. Different

historical elements are adapted to tell a universal story about war.

There any number of elements that can be examined, so a look at the

portrayal of military culture in Gundam is a good place to begin since the military is so

central to the story. In western countries, a particularly well known stereotype of the

Pacific War is the fanaticism and brutality of the Japanese military. Some aspects of

this are found in Gundam. In terms of the stereotypical fanaticism, suicide attacks

reminiscent of the Kamikaze Special Attack Forces occur in almost every Gundam

series, and characters fighting to the death is quite common; however there are only

two instances where a character commits suicide or attempts to commit suicide

rather than be captured.

As for brutality, In the first two Gundam television series, disciplining of

subordinates through physical abuse is relatively more common than in later series

though the actual violence shown is usually limited to a slap in the face. In Zeta

Gundam from 1985, there are six episodes in which a character is disciplined

including at least one lengthy sequence showing a beating of the main protagonist.

45
In contrast, it is not clear whether the single instance from 2002's Gundam SEED is

actually a case of disciplining a subordinate. Gundam SEED also has a scene which

emphasizes that violence against prisoners is forbidden. This may be in part be an

attempt to distance the portrayal of the military from Imperial Army because of a

recognition of the broad acceptance of the necessity of the Self-Defence Forces

(SDF) by Japanese society (Hook, 1996, 107). However, within the SDF itself,

the “traditional military culture that permits violence still prevails” in the words of a

former Maritime SDF officer candidate who resigned from the military because of

physical abuse (Matsubara, 2006, 25).

One facet of military culture that is depicted consistently across the years by

Gundam is the division of the military into factions, cliques, and rivalries between

individuals and units. Of course, the normal hierarchical, unequal relationships in the

military are reflected in Gundam: mobile suit pilots receive extra food rations

because they are pilots, much like Japanese Army officers received better food than

the enlisted men (Cook and Cook, 1992, 139). This goes further with the depiction of

the Titans in Zeta Gundam. The Titans are a special forces group within the regular

Earth Federation military that are recruited from only the Earth itself not the space

colonies. Although the Titans nominally hold the same rank as regular Federation

troops, they are considered elite and outrank the regular soldiers. The same was

true of the Imperial Navy with the Naval Academy graduates being considered elite

with other officers being assigned second class positions (Cook and Cook, 1992,

303). Again this has not changed in the modern SDF with National Defence

Academy graduates being “notorious for dominating other officer candidates” during

officer training (Matsubara, 2006, 25).

46
 Gundam Wing perhaps deserves special mention here in that it most clearly

alludes to the struggles between various military factions within the Imperial Army

during the 1930s. Two of the major groupings found in the Imperial Army were the

Kōdō (Imperial Way Faction) and the Tōsei (Control Group) (Crowley, 1962, 309).

The Kōdō group emphasized the martial spirit and tradition of Imperial Japan

(Crowley, 1962, 314) believing that battles would be won through bravery of

individual soldiers (Ienaga, 1968, 49) while the Tōsei group was interested in

mechanizing the Army, eliminating the regional factionalism in the Army, and creating

a nation that could be mobilized for total war (Crowley, 1962, 317-318). Similar to

the Kōdō group, the character Treize Khushrenada, commander of the OZ military

organization, romanticizes combat and believes that through the stress of battle men

can reach their true potential. He opposes the development and introduction of

‘mobile dolls’, unmanned mobile suits because they dehumanize war. Opposite

Treize is the character Tsubarov, the engineer who designed the mobile dolls and

who believes that highly mechanized combat is the future of warfare. Treize ends up

losing in an internal power struggle and is placed under house arrest. Those loyal to

him form the Treize Faction and attempt to stage a coup d’etat but are unable to

defeat the mobile dolls.

As well as the existence of factions within the military, depictions of militarism

are quite common in Gundam. Civilian controls on the military are rarely portrayed

and are usually ineffectual if they are. In Mobile Suit Gundam, the Zeon military is

essentially an extension of the ruling Zabi family with each of the four children of

Degwin Zabi having their own command, while on the Federation side, government

structures outside of the military are apparently nonexistent. Zeta Gundam does

47
depict a legislative assembly; however, the leader of the Titans, Admiral Jamitov

Hymem, has been given carte blanche to hunt down those in the space colonies

opposed to the Earth Federation rule. Which the Titans use to suppress, with poison

gas, a protest movement in one of the colony cylinders7–massacring the entire

population. In Stardust Memory at what appears to be a briefing session or

committee meeting between civilian authorities and the military, one officer speaks

dismissively of “civilian control” when he realizes the politicians just want to minimize

the political fallout from the military operations.

Gundam SEED provides the best developed depiction of a political struggle

between civilian authorities and the military. At the start of the series, the PLANTs,

Gundam SEED‘s analogue to Zeon, have an elected ruling council with the

chairman, Siegel Clyne, being a civilian and only three or four of the members being

from the military. Clyne is a moderate who advocates a negotiated settlement to the

war, but his position erodes as the war continues. Another council member, Patrick

Zala, is the leader of ZAFT, the PLANTs’ military organization. Zala is portrayed as

a militarist who actively suppresses information in military reports presented to the

council in order to undermine the moderates position. This is much like the Japanese

military which kept much of the information regarding its operations classified, so that

even cabinet ministers did not know what was going on (Ienaga, 1968, 38-39).

Soon, Zala supplants Clyne as council chairman and controls the council. He then

misleads the moderates with false information so he can get council support for a

major military operation. The operation fails, and Zala blames the moderates, having

7
A single colony cylinder is 6 km in diameter and 30 km long. A colony cylinder can support a
population of about three million. Each space colony, called ‘sides’ consists of multiple colony
cylinders orbiting at the same point.

48
Clyne assassinated and the other moderate council members arrested to eliminate

all opposition.

Gundam SEED is unique among the Gundam series in its emphasis on a

racial component to the conflict. Earlier Gundam series, particularly Zeta Gundam,

sometimes imply that racism exists between those living in space and those living on

the Earth, but Gundam SEED makes it a major plot point. In Gundam SEED,

humanity is divided between the Naturals and the Coordinators. The Coordinators

are genetically enhanced human beings who had their genes operated on at the

embryo stage or the descendants of such human beings. They are portrayed as

having superior mental and physical capabilities. Because such operations are

expensive, the Coordinators make a small minority of the population and are

resented by the majority Naturals. An anti-Coordinator organization known as Blue

Cosmos goes further and views the Coordinators as an abomination against nature

and begins a terrorist campaign of beatings, bombings, and assassinations of

Coordinators. To escape the prejudice, most of the Coordinators emigrate from the

Earth to the PLANT space colonies. The PLANTs were established to be

manufacturing and research facilities that provide goods and services for the masses

living on Earth. There is a resemblance to the burakumin in the racism of Gundam

SEED: the Coordinators are segregated, essentially due to the kind of work they are

freely able to do. To complete the analogy, the rallying cry of Blue Cosmos is “for the

preservation of our blue and pure world.” For Blue Cosmos, the Coordinators are

unclean.

On the other hand, many Coordinators, including Patrick Zala, begin to think of

themselves as the next step in human evolution and the Naturals as sub-human.

49
Zala is quite clearly a villain who takes a lead role in the militarization of the PLANTs

in Gundam SEED. He is portrayed as monomaniacal in his prosecution of the war to

the point that he is not the father of his son but rather the commander-in-chief of a

soldier By the end of the series, he has come to the point that he considers genocide

the only possible resolution to the war. Zala’s counterpart in Blue Cosmos, Murata

Azrael, is equally obsessed with the destruction of the Coordinators.

Since Gundam SEED ran on television from October 2002 to September

2003, a year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001, and during the buildup to and the

subsequent invasion of Iraq, its theme of blind racist hatred and portrayal of a

polarized world may have been influenced by current events8. Certainly, the

portrayal of the Earth nation known as the Orb Union seems to have been clearly

influenced by the ongoing Constitutional debate that was once again pushed to the

forefront by events outside of Japan. With the attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent

wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the debate in Japan over the practicality of the

Constitution’s Article 9 and role of the Self-Defence Forces heated up once again

much as it did during the Gulf War in 1991. The debate centred around what role the

SDF should play in the ‘war on terror’. In the weeks following the 9/11 attacks, the

major Japanese daily newspapers ran editorials discussing how Japan should

respond as a nation. Each of these newspapers, the Yomiuri, the Sankei, the Asahi,

and the Mainichi, viewed the attacks as an attack on an international system of which

Japan is a part. The editorials argued with a sense of urgency that Japan must meet

the challenge posed by 9/11 and avoid the same policy failure of the Gulf War (Saft

and Ohara, 2006, 90-91). The policy failure of not contributing troops.

8
Or possibly the scriptwriter had just read the Japanese translation of John Dower’s War without
Mercy, published in December 2001, whose central thesis is that racial fear and hatred were major
factors in the conduct of the war between Japan and the United States.

50
 To understand the editorial positions, some background on the Constitution

and Japan’s response to the Gulf War will is in order. Article 9 renounces war as a

means of settling international disputes and stipulates that Japan is not to maintain

war potential. Ever since the Constitution was promulgated there have been many

who have wished to revise it including members of the ruling Liberal Democratic

Party (LDP); however, the majority of the Japanese public embraced the Constitution

and have been wary of any revision of the antiwar clause (Hook, 1996, 103).

Additionally, the opposition Japanese Socialist Party (JSP) and Japanese

Communist Party (JCP) had always maintained a large enough presence in the Diet

to block any revision until the mid 1990s. In order to circumvent the opposition, the

ruling LDP, essentially has revised the Constitution through interpretation. Part of

this revision through interpretation was the establishment of the SDF in the 1950s

and the incremental upgrading of its capabilities until it became one of the world’s

largest and best equipped militaries by the mid 1990s.

Intertwined with the Constitution is the security treaty with United States which

compromises the sovereignty of Japan and is arguably unconstitutional. With the

security treaty, Japan is no longer responsible for its defence; the United States is.

Through the security treaty, the United States has pressured Japan to take a more

active military role in international affairs with the Gulf War being a watershed

moment. Due to the domestic opposition to overseas deployment of SDF personnel,

Japan became the target of international criticism following the Gulf War despite

having paid some thirteen billion dollars to fund the war. The Japanese were

accused of chequebook diplomacy and doing too little too late. Although the

Japanese government could not meet its goal of sending SDF personnel overseas to

51
aid in the Gulf War, it did establish that a dispatch of the SDF could be viable means

of contributing to the international peace (Yamaguchi, 1992, 166). So shortly after

the Gulf War a bill permitting the dispatch of SDF personnel to Cambodia as UN

peacekeepers passed the Diet.

During the 1990s, the Japanese Socialist Party became increasingly irrelevant

with an inflexible defence of Article 9 of the Constitution and an inability to offer any

foreign policy alternatives. The party precipitated its end by forming an alliance with

the LDP and accepting the constitutionality of the SDF despite the contradictions with

its avowed support of pacifism. By the time of the Iraq War, the Japanese

government was able to dispatch SDF troops to a combat zone with relatively little

opposition, because it was able to argue that the SDF dispatch was contributing to

the international peace.

In Gundam SEED, the Orb Union parallels Japan in several ways. Like Japan,

the Orb is an archipelago in Pacific Ocean. It’s main island is called Onogoro which

is the name of the first island created by the gods in Japanese mythology. Making

the allusion more obvious, the ships of the Orb Union’s navy have helicopter pads

that look very similar to the hinomaru, the Japanese national flag. Most importantly,

the Orb Union is a nation that “will not invade another nation,” that “will not allow

another nation to invade [itself],” and that “will not intervene in the conflicts of other

nations.” Like Japan, the Orb Union renounces the use of war as a means of

resolving international disputes. Also like Japan, the Orb Union maintains a

formidable military. Unlike Japan though, the Orb remains officially neutral in the

conflict between the PLANTs and the Earth Alliance and maintains its military so that

it may exercise its right of self defence and maintain its sovereignty without relying on

52
any alliances. Unlike 1995's Gundam Wing, which had an unarmed neutral nation,

the creators of Gundam SEED suggested that unarmed neutrality was unworkable

and that armed forces were necessary to maintain neutrality, an idea much like the

acceptance of the SDF by most Japanese even though military forces are forbidden

by the Constitution.

The first appearance of the Orb Union establishes Orb’s foreign policy of

diplomacy and negotiation and the wish for peace of its top leaders; the second

appearance marks an attack on its ideals and sovereignty. The Atlantic Federation,

the most powerful of the Earth Alliance nations and whose capital is Washington DC,

attempts to coerce the Orb Union into joining the Alliance. The Atlantic Federation

dispatches a powerful flotilla to the main island of Onogoro and issues an ultimatum:

the Orb Union must join the Alliance and allow the Alliance use of its spaceport

facilities or the Orb Union will be destroyed.

The leader of the Atlantic Federation flotilla is Murata Azrael who criticizes the

Orb Union as hiding behind its rhetoric when the fate of the Natural world is

threatened with extinction by the Coordinators. Azrael only permits two choices to

the Orb Union, that echo Bush’s often repeated statement, “You're either with us or

against us in the fight against terror” (CNN.com, 2001b). The Orb Union must either

be with the Naturals or be with the Coordinators. The leader of the Orb Union, Lord

Uzumi, refuses this dichotomy, not only by refusing to join the Alliance but also by

refusing aid from ZAFT. The depiction of the leadership of the Orb Union is arguably

one of the tragic hero with Lord Uzumi and other top officials sacrificing themselves

as they cause the Orb Union’s spaceport facilities to self destruct. In the new

53
millennium, there is no room in the international order for the neutrality of either the

Orb Union or the Japanese Socialist Party.

Morris-Suzuki makes the point that it is also important to note what historical

elements are missing from a telling. There a number of elements of Japanese

wartime history that are either only obliquely referenced by Gundam or not at all.

Weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear weapon is one of these elements.

Although weapons of mass destruction are used as plot devices and the audience is

sometimes shown the effects on the landscape, we are rarely shown the impact of an

attack on the survivors of that attack. In part this may be because the weapons are

usually so powerful that there are no survivors.

Most of the depictions of such weapons are of either nuclear weapons, super

beam weapons, or colony drops–the deliberate dropping of an empty space colony

cylinder onto the Earth. Colony drops are used in particular as a narrative substitute

for nuclear weapons by Gundam. However, in the over two hundred episodes of

Gundam that I watched, the only survivor of a colony drop depicted was the

character Rosamia Badam from Zeta Gundam. Rosamia is introduced as having lost

her family in a colony drop seven years earlier and is portrayed as being emotionally

and mentally unbalanced, but this is due only in part to her experience of surviving.

Although there is clearly an encoded message of the necessity of survival throughout

Gundam (Ashbaugh, 2004, 10), the struggles of the survivors after the war or post

apocalypse is not shown. Gundam is a war story and when one war is finished

another takes its place. The story always focuses on those who are fighting the war.

Poison gas as a weapon of mass destruction has a prominent role in 1985's

Zeta Gundam, yet only receives a passing reference in one other series. This is

54
significant because Japan was one of only two of the major combatants during World

War II that used poison gas as a weapon (Italy being the other). The Allies were

prepared to retaliate in kind if the Axis powers used gas warfare, but the Japanese

only used gas against the Chinese who were unable to retaliate. There are a number

of factors contributing to the introduction of poison gas in Zeta Gundam. Although

the it was common knowledge among historians that poison gas had been used

during the war, the discovery of documents detailing the use of gas by the historian

Yoshimi Yoshiaki in 1984 (Otake, 1996; Buruma, 1994, 110) coupled with the

publicizing of the activities of the Imperial Army’s Unit 731 by the Morimura Seiichi’s

best selling book The Devil’s Feast raised the public awareness of Japanese

atrocities during the war (Igarashi, 2001, 203).

Although the use of poison gas is directly depicted and portrayed as

reprehensible in Zeta Gundam, the issue of human experimentation like that of Unit

731 is only obliquely addressed, but it is a plot element that has carried forward to

other series. In Zeta Gundam, there are two characters who have been enhanced

through the use of drugs and psychological conditioning to become superior mobile

suit pilots: Rosamia Badam and Four Murasame. How exactly these characters

have been enhanced is not clear; however they are depicted as experimental

subjects and are shown to have been dehumanized becoming little more than objects

to be used by Titans organization. Four is named as she is because she was the

fourth subject at the Murasame Lab. One scene detailing an experiment on Four has

the Titans’ leader, Jamitov Hymem, watching Four writhe in pain as she attempts to

remotely control a mobile suit through her thoughts alone. Jamitov halts the

55
experiment not because Four is in pain but because the control system being tested

is not effective if it results in the death of the pilot.

Gundam SEED also has similarly enhanced mobile suit pilots, and they are

treated as objects to be used as well, being referred to as biological CPUs. The

Gundam SEED biological CPUs are shown to be psychopathic in battle due to the

influence of drugs that they are given. When the influence of the drugs wears off,

they are then depicted as going through painful withdrawal symptoms, often

surrounded by lab coat wearing doctors who seem show no hint of sympathy for their

suffering.

A final element that has not been addressed is the ‘comfort women’ issue.

During the war, many women were forced to provide sexual services for the Imperial

Forces. This is a particularly contentious issue for many in Japan and outside. As

mentioned earlier, most junior high school textbooks have retreated from mentioning

the comfort women due to the efforts of Fujioka Nobakatsu and others like him. One

argument given for not mentioning the comfort women is that junior high school

students are too young to be exposed to such ideas. In a speech at the Foreign

Correspondents’ Club of Japan, Fujioka’s stated that including the comfort women in

textbooks is:

harmful for personal development of the children, who are at puberty.

There is nothing to be gained by delving into the darker aspect of

human nature, that of sexual desire in an abnormal situation, war-time,

when children should first learn about the relationship of love and

sexual intimacy. Boys will look at girls as objects of sexual desire, girls

will look at boys as beasts. (At the Frontlines, 1999)

56
This argument also can be applied to television programs such as Gundam which are

aimed at roughly the same audience as the textbooks.

So here again, Gundam can only obliquely reference an element of Japanese

history. There are a number of short scenes in different Gundam series that suggest

soldiers have relationships with prostitutes. In Stardust Memory there is a rest and

relaxation scene at what may be a hostess bar but may just be a nightclub. In Char’s

Counterattack, Char brings the thirteen year old Quess Paraya on board his ship,

and she is subjected to whistles and wolf calls by the crew. In The 08th MS Team,

two of the team members go to a bar looking to party with some women.

The two series that most directly address the comfort women issue are Zeta

Gundam and Gundam SEED. Zeta Gundam has a three scenes where a female

character is clearly sexually harassed in that the character is touched sexually

against her will. Two of the three scenes feature the same character, Reccoa Londe.

Reccoa initially appears as a mobile suit pilot fighting alongside Quattro Bajeena

(Char Aznable in disguise) and Kamille Bidan against the Titans. Reccoa desires a

relationship with Quattro, but Quattro treats her indifferently. Reccoa ends up joining

the Titans because she cannot be with Quattro. Instrumental in her defection is a

Titans commander, Paptimus Scirocco, who seems to have a hypnotic power over

women. Before she is killed in battle, Reccoa exclaims that men use women as

tools and they will not hesitate to violate women when they have the chance 9.

Although Zeta Gundam aired years before the comfort women issue became

politically contentious, it aptly illustrates the kind of objectification of women that led

to the military brothels, since both Quattro and Scirocco are portrayed as users of

women.
9
Translation given on the DVD. In Japanese she says “hazukashimeru kotoshika shiranainoyo”

57
 Gundam SEED’s reference to the comfort women is embodied by the fifteen

year old Flay Allster, who sees her father’s ship blown up by ZAFT forces. Like the

White Base from Mobile Suit Gundam, the Archangel has a number of civilians who

become members of the crew. Flay initially does not, although her friends and

acquaintances, including the main protagonist Kira Yamato, do. After her father’s

death, Flay becomes an orphan and chooses to enlist in the Earth Alliance military.

Her choice actually spurs the others to officially enlist as well. The others though

have already taken on responsibilities aboard the ship while Flay has done nothing.

Kira in particular, as a Coordinator, was the only one on board that could pilot the

Gundam and was almost entirely responsible for protecting the ship.

In a battle that shortly follows everyone’s enlistment, Kira is shown unable to

protect a shuttle of refugees fleeing the battle zone. He watches helplessly as an

enemy mobile suit fires upon and destroys the shuttle. On board the shuttle is a

young girl who had given Kira an origami flower in gratitude for protecting her and her

family while they were aboard the Archangel. When he returns to his quarters after

the battle, Kira is shattered and he breaks down sobbing uncontrollably. Flay is there

and she, quite literally, comforts him, holding him and trying to soothe his anguish.

Later, she, quite euphemistically, comforts him. In the rest of her time aboard the

Archangel, her duties as a member of the crew are never clearly depicted. She is

usually shown either sitting on a bed or pursuing her relationship with Kira.

Flay as a symbol of the comfort women is problematic on a number of points.

First, she chooses to join the military. Second, she chooses to have sex with Kira in

order to manipulate him into continue fighting against the Coordinators. Flay, who

before had been prejudiced towards Coordinators, comes to hate them at the death

58
of her father. For his part, Kira is depicted accepting the relationship with Flay

because he has been attracted to her for a long time. Although she is arguably

traumatized by the death of her father and has no place to go, it appears that Flay

chooses her path. In a sense Flay appears to be a ‘normal’ prostitute rather than a

coerced sexual slave.

As Flay’s character develops, she slowly changes. After Kira’s apparent

death, she comes to realize that she has developed feelings for Kira and that she has

alienated her friends with her manipulations of him. Soon though, she becomes the

object of the manipulations of others. First she is reassigned from the Archangel

unwillingly, but before she can arrive at her new assignment she is captured by Rau

Le Creuset, a commander in the ZAFT forces and Gundam SEED’s Char Aznable

character. Le Creuset wonders what exactly Flay is since she wears a uniform but is

clearly not a soldier. In her time with Le Creuset, Flay is shown to be apprehensive

as she is surrounded by the enemy, yet she also comes to realize the Coordinators

are much the same as the Naturals. Le Creuset uses Flay by giving her top secret

information about the PLANTs and sending her to Azrael of the Earth Alliance. In the

time after Flay is separated from Kira and the rest of the Archangel crew, we get to

see a more vulnerable side of Flay as she is manipulated. Perhaps this is Flay’s true

face and the true face of a comfort woman: someone who has been taken away from

where she belongs, someone who is fearful, and ultimately someone who has been

used by others.

The Teller

59
 For Gundam, there has been primarily one creator who has overseen

production, Tomino Yoshiyuki. Vernal (1995) explores in detail Tomino’s intentions

regarding the message of Gundam, based in part on an interview conducted with

Tomino in preparation for his paper. Vernal finds that in the Gundam universe, it is

important for a person to choose to fight not for ideological reasons but rather for

their own individual personal reasons. He also concludes that Gundam contributes

to a general common sense pacifism in Japan by emphasizing an individual’s ability

to communicate and empathize with others, including the enemy, as a means of

negating the “cancerous authority of ideology” (Vernal, 1995, 82).

Tomino’s novelization of the original series explicitly articulates some of these

ideas. The emphasis on the need for communication and empathy is exemplified by

Tomino’s concept of the ‘Newtype’. Newtypes are human beings who have

developed heightened senses of intuition and empathy as an evolutionary adaption

due to the environmental pressures of living in space. As Tomino describes it,

Newtypes are people who have “a uncommonly developed sense of intuition and a

unique sense of humanity” that allow a ”new communion with others” and “transcend

traditional concepts of time and space” (2004, 384). The Newtypes are also to

“transcend the old thinking that had dragged the world into war” (Tomino, 2004, 384).

Newtypes with their heightened empathy gain an understanding of the enemy

during combat that allows the combatants a recognition of their shared humanity. In

a scene from Tomino’s novelization, Amuro kills an enemy Newtype from Zeon,

Kusko Al. At the moment of her death, Kusko communes with Amuro, who is also a

Newtype. Through this epiphanic moment, Amuro essentially experiences Kusko’s

life flashing before his eyes. As Tomino writes:

60
 It was then that Amuro finally realized the enormity of what he had

done–he had committed the unpardonable sin of killing someone he

normally would never have dreamed of hurting. He had lost control to

the war, to the technology of the machines, to the whole situation. But

it was no excuse. (2004, 314)

This empathy for others allows the Newtypes the personal subjectivity to

oppose war. Newtypes are particularly a feature of Tomino directed Gundam series,

however the emphasis on the importance of empathizing and communication is

found throughout Gundam. I believe that Tomino and the others who have followed

him have to tried to create protagonists who advocate ‘peace thought’ much like that

of the Peace Issues Discussion Group (Heiwa Mondai Danwakai), a group of

intellectuals who attempted to influence Japanese society’s attitudes towards peace

and militarism during the 1950s. This group attempted to prevent “the adoption of

any policy judged inimical to peace in the nuclear era” (Hook, 1996, 31). Like this

group who felt a deep responsibility for the war because they had not acted to

oppose it (Hook, 1996, 30), Gundam protagonists are usually shown to develop a

sense of responsibility during the course of the series towards bringing the war to an

end. Hook describes Tsurumi Shunsuke’s definition of peace thought as being

“rooted in an individual's strong antipathy towards war or his or her hatred of war”

(1996, 29); in turn, the Gundam protagonists attempts to end the war are rooted in

their own experience and hatred of war.

Characters who do not have an antipathy towards war are not to be trusted. In

Zeta Gundam, the main protagonist Kamille Bidan is critical of those who think of war

as a game. Kamille also calls the enemy ace, Yazan, a monster because he enjoys

61
the visceral thrill of the fight. Kamille is even suspicious of his mentor Quattro

Bajeena who appears to enjoy going into combat too much. This is with good

reason as the film, Char’s Counterattack shows. In that film, Quattro has re-assumed

his Char persona and initiated a conflict with the Earth Federation. As the head of

Neo-Zeon, Char holds the belief that mankind’s future is in space not on Earth, since

it is only in space that people can become Newtypes. To thrust mankind into this

future, Char attempts to make the planet uninhabitable by causing asteroids to collide

with the Earth.

Char has become driven by an ideology of the Newtype to the point that he

believes those still living on Earth are merely parasites or vermin polluting the planet.

For Char, those living on the planet are impure and must be punished. This linkage

of Char to purity is explicitly affirmed in a dream sequence. Amuro dreams that

Lalah Sune, Char’s Newtype protege from Mobile Suit Gundam, tells him that Char is

pure and that is why she loved him. This emphasis on purity is an allusion to both

the ideology of the purity of the Japanese nation during the Asia-Pacific war and the

Nazi’s belief in an Aryan master race. This belief in the purity of Newtypes permits

him to do something that even he acknowledges to be evil: Amuro, watashi ha akogi

koto ga yatte iru, [Amuro, I’m doing something extremely wicked] later justifying it as

a sacrifice that he is making.

In response to Char’s assertion that the people on Earth are merely parasites

polluting the planet, Amuro asserts that “human wisdom can overcome problems.”

Char responds by saying, “Then grant all those ignorant people your so-called

wisdom.” Amuro, unlike Char, trusts in people. In the climatic battle scene between

62
Char and Amuro articulates this basic trust with the words, “I can wait for humanity to

learn and grow.”

Amuro’s expression of trust in humanity echoes The Peace Issues Discussion

Group emphasis on the necessity of trust in the people in order attain peace (Hook,

1996, 30). Zeta Gundam as well addresses the theme of trust. Much like Yoko

Ono’s conceptual art piece “Play it by Trust” which is an all white chess board with all

white pieces, true Newtypes, like Amuro or Kamille, recognize that the division

between the two sides of a conflict is artificial and the only through trust can war be

eliminated. Ironically, it is Char, in his Quattro persona, who makes this explicit by

declaring that it is the Titans’ (the villains from Zeta Gundam) inability to trust others

that has led them to commit atrocities such as using poison gas on an entire civilian

space colony.

The emphasis on putting trust in ‘the people’ is a reference to democracy. In

the minds of many Japanese there is a link between democracy and pacifism

particularly as embodied by the Constitution (Yamaguchi, 1992, 160). A specific

example of this is the conclusion of Ienaga’s The Pacific War where he links the

terms ‘democracy’ and ‘pacifism’ with the Constitution several times (1968,243-245).

In the final episode of Zeta Gundam, Kamille Bidan, who acts as a proponent of the

people, confronts Haman Karn and Paptimus Scirocco, two characters who see

themselves as the heirs of the elites who have always ruled the world. Harman

seeks to restore the Zabi family which had been overthrown at the end of Mobile Suit

Gundam, while Scirocco sees himself as something greater than the common

people, a genius whose rightful role is to command. Scirocco dismisses Kamille’s

63
belief in the people as cheap sentimentality and Kamille himself as immature. A

common way for elites to justify their social position according to Dower (1993, 262).

In Gundam Wing also, the antagonists driving the war are Earth residing elites

who believe in their divine right to rule. They are aristocrats have who have funded a

military-industrial-complex, the “Romefeller Foundation”, which developed the mobile

suits that have subjugated the space colonies. The authorities in the space colonies,

on the other hand, appear to have a civilian controlled system of government and

favour negotiation over violence as a means of resolving disputes. This is

externalized by having the aristocrats of the Romefeller Foundation and its

associated military organization OZ wear ornate 19th century military dress uniforms

while the representatives of the space colonies always wear civilian clothing. In the

Gundam Wing world, the space colonists have been forced to rely upon one another,

to trust one another because of the harsh environment of space, which led to

peaceful existence until the arrival of the military forces from Earth.

Gundam Wing further solidifies the influence of the Peace Issues Discussion

Group on Gundam with the introduction of the character Relena Peacecraft who

advocates “total pacifism”. As the heir to the throne of the neutral Sanc Kingdom,

Relena is given a bully pulpit to expound her views. This total pacifism is essentially

the same as the peaceful coexistence and unarmed neutrality proposed by the Group

(Hook, 1996, 31). Relena even establishes a school to teach total pacifism, a clear

analogue for peace education. The Sanc Kingdom like Japan has its pacifism

undermined by forces within and without the kingdom. Inside the kingdom, several

characters, although sympathetic to Relena’s goals, form a mobile suit corps

believing that unarmed neutrality is unworkable. Outside the kingdom, the

64
Romefeller Foundation is threatened by Relena’s actions finding its political support

dwindling. In the same way, Japan has had Article 9 of its constitution hollowed out

with the establishment of the Self-Defense Forces and signing of the various security

treaties between Japan and the United States

Although it seems clear that the creators have injected antiwar sentiment into

Gundam, can too much can be made of this? As Fukuda Mitsuo, director of Gundam

SEED and Gundam SEED DESTINY, has said, “anime isn’t really serious. . . . With

my son, I only discuss war on the level that it is bad” (Gundam Seed Info Zone,

2004). This may just be that the creators themselves are aware of the limited

influence Gundam or any television program may have on its audience. Whether or

not there is a grand antiwar critique as part of Gundam, it is interesting to sift through

the references and analyze its message.

65
Images and Consequences of Violence

To determine if Gundam is an effective antiwar statement, the charges that

Gundam is a celebration of war (Napier, 1996, 7) or that it relishes in the brutal

violence and effects of war (Crawford, 1996, 82) have to be addressed. The success

of Gundam’s antiwar message hinges on whether the negative effects of war that are

depicted outweigh the excitement of the battle scenes. In order to do this, an

understanding of the differences between the violence depicted by Japanese anime

and American cartoons will be helpful.

Violence in Japanese anime is quite common, but a fundamental difference

between the violence found in Japanese anime and in Japan’s television media in

general and that found in American media is that there is a greater emphasis

portraying a protagonist as a victim of violence. A study from the early 1980s

compared the nature of the violence found in Japanese programs and American

import programs aired on Japanese television networks (Iwao, Pool, and Hagiwara,

1981). The study found that for live action television programs Japanese programs

were much more likely to show good characters as victims of violence than the

American programs: in Japanese programs “good major characters were wounded

or killed three times as often as bad ones,” but the American programs rarely

showed a good major character as a victim (Iwao et al., 1981, 34). The Japanese

programs were also more likely to show blood, especially in the case of a character

being wounded, than the American programs (Iwao et al.,1981, 35). This emphasis

on the suffering of the protagonist in Japanese media appears to be consistent with

66
Japanese society’s victims consciousness towards the war and the attraction of the

‘tragic hero’ narrative to the Japanese public.

Iwao et al. (1981, 35-36) noted that the violence found in Japan anime and the

American import cartoons were more similar in nature than the violence of the live

action programs. In anime, good characters were just as likely to initiate violence as

bad characters, and bad characters were equally likely to be wounded or killed as

good characters. American cartoons as well were more likely to show the

protagonist as a victim of violence. In applying this aspect of the study to Gundam,

there are two interrelated points to be made: first, Iwao et al. did not differentiate

between genres within the animated television programs; second, their sample was

taken from 1977 before Mobile Suit Gundam originally aired and created the real

robot anime genre. As can be seen from Wilson et al.10 (2002), genres are important

in assessing the violence found in children’s television programming.

Wilson et al. show that the depictions of violence found in comedic (‘slapstick’)

cartoons and superhero programs–the two most violent genres they examined–were

fundamentally different. The kind of humourous violence associated with slapstick

cartoons has its greatest effect on very young children who have difficulty

distinguishing between fantasy and reality (approximately 3-7 years old). Unlike

slapstick cartoons, superhero programs are a concern for older children–such as the

Gundam audience–because the violence is usually both glamourized and sanitized.

Glamourized in the sense that an attractive character commits the violence, the

violence is condoned in the context of the story, and often the violence is rewarded

or praised. Sanitized in the sense that the harm suffered by the characters is

10
Wilson, Barbara J.; Smith, Stacy L.; Potter, W. James; Kunkel, Dale; Linz, Daniel; Colvin, Caralyn
M.; and Donnerstein, Edward

67
“unreasonably low . . . [when] compared to what would happen in real life” or longer

term consequences of the violence are not acknowledged (Wilson et al., 2002, 28-

29).

Accepting the results of the Iwao et al. study, it appears that Japanese

television glamourized and sanitized violence much less than American television,

though it may have glamourized suffering. Although Gundam arguably glamourizes

violence by having often exhilarating battle scenes featuring war machines that some

of the audience find to be ‘cool’, the producers of Gundam have endeavoured not to

sanitize the violence. From the very first, Mobile Suit Gundam established that death

is a constant during war. In the very first episode, a stream of civilians is shown

fleeing a battle inside a space colony when a stray cannon round lands among them.

After the explosion from the round, a crater surrounded by corpses is depicted.

Among the casualties is the family of a major character, Fraw Bow. Fraw, who left

the stream of civilians just before the shell hit, narrowly avoids being killed and runs

back to her mother’s corpse screaming, “Mother!” Such scenes showing the impact

of the death of one character on other characters are commonly shown in the various

Gundam series.

In order to determine whether or not the violence in Gundam is sanitized, I

counted the number of episodes in each of the series in which at least one incident of

violence occurred. I broke down the incidents of violence into several categories as

can be seen from the code sheet. In addition to the categories of violence against

anonymous victims, named minor characters, and major recurring characters, there

are also categories for mass casualties, atrocities, and suicidal attacks.

68
 Anonymous Victims
1

0.9

0.8
Percentage of episodes

0.7

0.6
Non-combatants
0.5 Both
Combatants
0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1

0
All MS Zeta War in the Stardust Gundam 08th MS Gundam
episodes Gundam Gundam Pocket Memory Wing Team SEED

The data for anonymous casualties shows that some sort of violence occurs in

over 80% of Gundam episodes. When combined with the data for minor and major

characters, 95% (213 of 224) of all Gundam episodes have at least one incident of

violence. Of course since Gundam is a war story, this data essentially establishes

the obvious: in war there are many victims of violence. However, I was interested in

if there were any trends in portraying noncombatants as anonymous victims. For

most of the series, combatants make up the majority of victims (with the exception of

War in the Pocket which will be discussed below).

Named minor characters and major recurring characters as victims of

violence are more meaningful, because they are characters that can illustrate such

longer term consequences of violence as war injuries or the emotional effect of a

death on the survivors. Named minor characters often appear in a single episode or

perhaps a single multiple episode story arc, but are usually given enough screen

time to suggest that they are more than faceless victims but rather are individuals

with lives and a history off screen. Major recurring characters are either depicted in

the majority of episodes until their death or appear in two or more story arcs. An

69
example of a major character is Ryu Jose from Mobile Suit Gundam who appears in

almost every episode until his death in episode 21.

Recurring Characters as Victims

0.9

0.8
Percentage of episodes

0.7

0.6

0.5 Discipline
Wounded
0.4 Killed

0.3

0.2

0.1

0
All MS Zeta War in the Stardust Gundam 08th MS Gundam
episodes Gundam Gundam Pocket Memories Wing Team SEED

Approximately 20% of Gundam episodes depict a major character being killed.

Most of the Gundam series have a recurring character killed in 25 to 30% of their

episodes. Mobile Suit Gundam is slightly below average at 18.6% (8 character in 43

episodes) but makes up for it with over 35% of episodes depicting the death of a

minor character. Gundam Wing is the most unusual of the series watched because it

has an extremely low death rate of major characters. Only two major characters are

killed in 49 episodes and neither character is a protagonist.

War in the Pocket, on the other hand, seems to have an extremely high death

rate. That is somewhat misleading because it is a six episode OAV release, so each

individual death has greater impact on the averages for the series. Two major

characters are killed in the fourth episode and third dies of his wounds in the fifth

episode. In the final episode, one of the three lead characters is killed. Although

War in the Pocket cannot be directly compared to the four main Gundam TV series

70
because of its brevity, it has a strong anti-war message due to its shorter, more

focused story.

War in the Pocket – An example

The main character in War in the Pocket is a fifth-grade elementary school

student named Alfred (Al) Izuruha living in neutral space colony during the conflict

between Zeon and the Earth Federation. Al and his friends are fascinated by

weapons and other military hardware, especially mobile suits. These boys are similar

to the children in wartime Japan who would have bought and read militaristic

children’s magazines (Nakar, 2003, 71) and who would have found a fighter plane

like the Zero or the Hayabusa “an object of admiration” (Gibney, 1995, 190 also 34).

As Satō Hideo put it when talking about his childhood during the war: “war is fun.

Boys like war. War can become the material for play.” (Cook and Cook, 1992, 239).

Furthermore, Al and his friends are also not unlike many of the boys in the Gundam

audience who play with Gundam toys or build Gundam models.

One day when some Zeon mobile suits break into the colony, Al and his

friends are excited to actually see real mobile suits in action. Without thinking of the

consequences, they think the battle and explosions are “cool” (sugei) and “better

than fireworks” (hanabi yoka kirei da). One of the Zeon suits crash lands in the

confusion, and Al finds the suit and meets the pilot, a raw recruit named Bernie

Wiseman. Through Al, Bernie obtains some video footage that suggests a Gundam

mobile suit has been shipped to the colony. Bernie escapes the colony and is

assigned to a battle hardened mobile suit team whose mission is to infiltrate the

71
colony and destroy the Gundam. Once again, Al finds Bernie and then begs the

team commander, Steiner, to let him join them because he has always wanted to be

a soldier. Deciding not to kill Al or hold him captive because it would cause problems

with the police, Steiner lets Al join the team as a mascot, holds him to secrecy, and

then has Bernie essentially babysit Al to keep them both out of the team’s way. As

Bernie looks after Al, he meets and is attracted to Christina (Chris) Mackenzie who is

Al’s neighbour and former babysitter and who is also secretly the Gundam test pilot.

Over the course of several episodes Bernie becomes a big brother figure for

Al whose parents are thinking of separating because his father’s frequent absences

from home due to work. For Al and to a lesser extent Bernie, the search for the

hidden Federation base with the Gundam becomes a game. Instead of joining his

friends as they play war in park, Al spends his time with Bernie looking for the hidden

base. They succeed, pinpointing the location of the Gundam. Using the information

provided by Al and Bernie, the Zeon team attacks.

In the ensuing battle the violence is not sanitized. When two of the Zeon

soldiers are killed in a gun battle, they are shown to be bloodied and in pain. There

is also a mobile suit battle between one Zeon suit and several Earth Federation suits

including the Gundam. Part of the battle takes place over a commercial district in the

colony, and in one particularly telling scene, a Federation mobile suit is shown

spiralling down towards the colony floor, there is a cut to a shot of a mother on the

street shielding her child in her arms just before the suit crashes, and then the final

shot is of a large explosion that flattens most of a block.

Even in victory for Chris and her Gundam, the violence is not completely

glamourized. Chris is shown emotionally exhausted and completely out of breath

72
after destroying the Zeon suit. Instead of being rewarded for making a kill or possibly

saving lives, Chris is told in the following episode that the civilian body count is 246

dead and 572 wounded by a colony police officer who clearly does not approve of the

Federation presence in the still neutral colony.

Al, who initially had thought of everything as a game, comes to realize the

consequences of war, particularly as it becomes more personal. During the battle, Al

sees two of Bernie’s teammates die. On the following day as the destruction is being

cleaned up, Al watches as the corpse of a boy his age is pulled from the rubble of a

building. He then learns that his school was hit. He asks his friends worriedly if

anyone was hurt. Since the attack took place after school, they are completely

unconcerned and are just happy to be able to collect shell casings left over from the

battle.

For the final two episodes, the consequences get raised considerably when

Bernie finds out the colony will be attacked with nuclear weapons by Zeon forces if

the Gundam is not destroyed. Al struggles with the realization that everyone he

knows may die, including his mother, his father who is returning home to the colony,

his schoolmates, Bernie, and Chris. One scene vividly depicts the destruction of the

colony with a nuclear flash, pika, and a massive shockwave blowing the colony apart

as Al imagines the destruction of his home.

Bernie on his part struggles with the moral dilemma of either trying somehow

to prevent the attack on the colony or fleeing to save his life. He initially attempts to

flee and urges Al to leave with his family. Bernie’s motivations are conflicted. On

one hand, he is a soldier in the Zeon military and has a responsibility to follow orders

and help Zeon win the war, but he also recognizes that the destruction of the colony

73
would be an immoral act. To resolve this conflict, he decides to try to destroy the

Gundam and remove the pretext for attacking the colony. With Al’s help, Bernie sets

up a trap for the Gundam unaware that Chris is its pilot.

The violence of this final battle is not sanitized. Both Bernie and Chris are

shown to make a concerted effort not fight near residential areas so as to avoid

collateral damage. Despite Bernie’s trap, his mobile suit is no match for the

Gundam. Although Bernie manages to severely damage the Gundam, in the end he

is killed by Chris. Compounding the irony of this, Al has rushed to the site of the

ambush to stop the battle because he has learned from his father that the Zeon ships

approaching the colony were destroyed. Al watches as Bernie’s suit is beaten and

appears to go into shock when he realizes that Bernie has been killed. Shortly after,

when addressed by a Federation soldier, Al briefly becomes more aware. He then

sees and recognizes Chris as she is pulled wounded from the wreckage of the

Gundam and goes deeper into shock.

Some longer term effects of the battle on Al are shown. Knowing that his

attack on the Gundam was unlikely to succeed, Bernie left a video letter to Al, giving

him enough information that he could successfully inform the authorities of the

imminent Zeon attack. In the letter, Bernie explains why he decided on his course of

action: in the end he was a soldier and he felt it necessary to complete the mission

he had been assigned. However, he tries to communicate that peace is preferable to

war by admonishing Al, “Don’t hate the Gundam pilot, the Feds” as a result of his

death, because they are just like him, trying to do what they think is right.

In the final scene of the anime, Al attends a memorial service at his school.

As the school principal makes a speech about the losses incurred during the war, Al

74
breaks down crying. Misunderstanding his feelings, his friends try to cheer him up by

saying, “Another war will start soon, and it’ll be even bigger, flashier, and more fun

than this one.” Al’s friend do not understand the consequences of war because they

have not been personally affected, and are essentially like any of the Gundam

audience who only see Gundam for the robots and space battles and who expect

each installment of Gundam to be flashier than the last. They have missed a central

part of Gundam which is the interpersonal relationships between the characters,

which undercuts the glamour of the violence and is supposed to make the audience

recognize the consequences of that violence.

Of course, as an OAV release War in the Pocket has greater freedom to show

violence especially blood and gore than a television series, but even Japanese

television anime has greater freedom to show violence and its consequences than

American television cartoons. When Gundam SEED was aired in the United States

on the Cartoon Network, it was rated TV-Y7 which means that the content had to be

acceptable for a child of 7 to 12 years old. Gundam SEED received this rating

irrespective of its themes and content because it is animation. This is despite the

series airing at 10:30 pm for the first 26 episodes and then 1:00 am for the remaining

episodes. In comparison, Gundam SEED aired at 6:00 pm in Japan. The TV-Y7

rating made necessary a number of edits because of unacceptable violence. Among

the cuts included shots of pilots in cockpits just before the destruction of their

machine (Wikipedia, 2006b). These scenes were edited to eliminate graphic

violence which has been argued leads to desensitization in a number of studies (as

summarized by Wilson et al., 2002, 10). However, I wonder if removing graphic

violence eliminates the context for the consequences of that violence. When Amuro

75
makes his first kill in the first episode of Mobile Suit Gundam, the enemy pilot in his

cockpit is shown screaming in fear before the Gundam slices his suit in half with its

beam sabre. A shot of the victim, especially when in fear or pain, is arguably an

image that decreases the risk of learning aggression (Baron, 1971a; Baron 1971b;

Wotring and Greenberg, 1973; as cited by Wilson et al., 2002, 10-11).

76
Grief and Remembrance

Expressions of Remembrance or Grief

0.65
0.6
0.55
Percentage of episodes

0.5
0.45
0.4
Remembrance
0.35
Grief
0.3
Either
0.25
0.2
0.15
0.1
0.05
0
All MS Zeta War in the Stardust Gundam 08th MS Gundam
episodes Gundam Gundam Pocket Memory Wing Team SEED

Since violence is only half the story I also looked at how some of the

consequences of violence are portrayed in Gundam. I counted the number of

episodes in which either some sort of act of remembrance or memorialization

occurred or some character expressed grief. An act of remembrance could be such

things as a funeral, the laying of flowers on a grave, or the keeping of a memento.

An expression of grief could be some sort of strong emotional reaction in response to

the death of another character. Although there seems to be no clear trend over time

regarding the depictions of such consequences of violence, most of the Gundam

series have some depiction of either remembrance or grief in at least a third of the

episodes. Only Zeta Gundam (30%) and Gundam Wing (22%) have fewer episodes

with such depictions. Gundam SEED is notable because it features especially high

rate of grief depictions–a full 40% of its episodes have a character expressing grief in

some way.

As an example, the character Miriallia Haw is shown progressing through

various components of grief over multiple episodes as she comes to terms with the

77
combat death of her boyfriend Tolle Keonig. As the communications officer aboard

mobile suit carrier Archangel, Miri first learns of Tolle’s death when all communication

with his fighter is cut off during the middle of combat. She reacts with denial

continually attempting to contact him long after the rest of the bridge crew realize that

he is unable to reply. Later she is depicted searching for him, looking in the flight

simulator that he did his training on. In a following episode, she impulsively attacks

an enemy prisoner with a knife, angry that the enemy pilot had survived the battle but

Tolle had not.

This is characteristic of Gundam SEED’s treatment of the deaths of recurring

characters. Noticeably more than other Gundam series, Gundam SEED uses

flashbacks scenes, including scenes of violence and death, as a means of

illustrating the emotional state of the surviving characters. In an emotionally wrought

scene between the characters Athrun Zala and Cagalli, Cagalli confronts Athrun

about his apparent killing of the protagonist Kira in battle. Although Kira and Athrun

had once been best friends when they were children, in the course of war they found

themselves as enemies. Athrun is shattered as he confronts the death of his friend.

Flashbacks are used to establish Athrun’s motivations for the killing: Kira had killed in

battle two of Athrun’s friends and comrades. But later in the same scene, another

flashback is used to remind the audience of Kira and Athrun’s shared childhood.

That war forces people to things that they would not normally do cannot be escaped.

One recurring flashback that is of particular importance to Gundam SEED is

the ‘Bloody Valentine Incident’–the destruction of the PLANT space colony Junius 7

by nuclear weapons. Early in the series, these flashbacks are used to establish the

horror of war and the consequences it has on anonymous innocents. Images of

78
ordinary people–men, women, and children–are shown going about their daily lives

at the moment missiles strike the exterior of the colony. In graphic detail the colony

is shown being pulled apart with the ground buckling like a massive earthquake and

sudden typhoon force winds as air escapes from the colony interior. A body count of

234 721 is given, a number similar in order of magnitude as the combined death toll

at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, the impact is not limited to anonymous

victims: it is later revealed that Athrun’s mother was at Junius 7 making the tragedy

more personal. This incident is the driving force behind the obsessive need for

victory of the inflexible PLANT leader Patrick Zala, Athrun’s father.

Although the images of grief carry a greater emotional impact on the viewer,

images of remembrance and memorialization are also quite common in Gundam.

Sometimes the two are combined effectively as in the closing scene of War in the

Pocket. Other significant memorial moments include the funerals for Paolo Cassius,

the original captain of the White Base, Ryu Jose, and Garma Zabi all in Mobile Suit

Gundam. Another smaller moment of remembrance occurs when Anavel Gato of

Stardust Memory takes a diamond with him to space to remind himself of the soldiers

who lost their lives protecting his launch from a Zeon base in an abandoned diamond

mine. Later when in space, Gato claims that he can hear the voice of the ocean as

he thinks about his comrades who died four years earlier in the war between Zeon

and the Earth Federation. This is a clear reference to the book Kike–Wadatuni no

Koe mentioned earlier.

Junius 7 serves as a focus for memorialization activities in Gundam SEED.

The character Lacus Clyne, PLANT council chairman Siegel Clyne’s daughter, is a

member of memorial committee which is organizing a memorial ceremony for the first

79
year anniversary of the destruction of Junius 7. The crew of the Archangel as well

holds its own memorial service for Junius 7 after being forced to scavenge supplies

from the floating debris of the colony. As they search the debris, the crew comes

across the remains of victims and are depicted visibly shaken by the sights they see.

They hold their impromptu service releasing hundreds perhaps thousands of origami

flowers among the debris calling to mind the origami cranes collected at the

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.

Looking at all these examples, I hope to have not only shown that Gundam

effectively provides a context for the violence it portrays but also that it is effective in

portraying the consequences of that violence on the various characters in the story.

The creators of Gundam may be constrained by audience expectations of

spectacular battle scenes and striking mecha11 designs, but they have successfully

created programs that manage to remain popular while still examining issues of war

and death in relative complexity. The rest is up to the audience.

11
Mecha refers to anything mechanical in anime. In Gundam’s case that would be primarily mobile
suits but would also include spaceships, jet fighters, and naval ships. Anything that could be made
into a model.

80
Conclusion
For this study, I intended to show a number of things regarding Gundam:

$ It is a genre

$ It shares a number of characteristics with pilot manga from the 1960s.

$ It acts as counter-memory to those pilot manga

$ It acts as a general antiwar statement rather than a specific critique of

Japan’s role in the Asia-Pacific War.

In order to define Gundam as a genre, I needed to keep in mind a number of

points regarding the nature of genres. Genres are products, they must be

standardized yet also have some novelty, and successful products inspire similar

products. Gundam meets all these criteria and has been extremely successful as a

product. That the original Mobile Suit Gundam was cancelled during its initial run is

evidence of its status as a genre. It did not conform to the standards of the super

robot genre, but instead engendered the new ‘real robot’ genre. As the first and as

the most successful of the real robot shows, in terms of both number of sequels and

the related merchandise, Gundam is certainly a sub-genre, but it is not so much of

stretch to consider it a genre unto itself. That Gundam series such as Mobile Fighter

G Gundam and SD Gundam Force self-parody the Gundam conventions gives added

force to the argument that Gundam is its own genre.

In creating the generic verisimilitude of Gundam, a number of motifs were

borrowed from the pilot manga from the 1960s by way of the super robot genre.

These include the focus on pilots, the youth of the protagonists, and the role of the

protagonist as a defender rather than an aggressor. Also like the pilot manga, the

81
portrayal of senior officers is generally negative. They are shown to be either desk

jockeys without any understanding of the needs of the combat troops or politically

ambitious schemers who are usually unscrupulous and manipulative. However, in

the pilot manga, the characters are most often fighting for the nation and were a

reflection of the time in which they were published, as Rikidôzan battled Americans

and won in wrestling at that time, so too the youthful pilots of the manga fought the

Americans and won, even if it was only for a day. Gundam came along later and

could not fight the same war.

Due to the wider audience of a television program as compared to manga and

to changing cultural attitudes. Gundam could not possibly maintain cultural

verisimilitude and tell a war story that did not include a general antiwar message. As

a society, Japan became broadly antiwar due to its experiences during the war. In

the words of an editorial from the Asahi Shimbun on the 25th anniversary of the

Hiroshima bombing:

The Japanese ... have not processed their experiences [of being

attacked by nuclear weapons] at the level of a racial problem or anti-

Americanism, but on the level of disavowing war in general and

eliminating nuclear weapons-that is, at the level of the whole of

humankind. The vast majority of Japanese rejected the attempt to whip

up hate towards a specific country in the name of ideology (Hook, 1996,

174).

Hook notes that this editorial is referring to the politicization of the anti-nuclear

movement by the Japanese communists, but if Tomino is one of the vast majority of

Japanese, the distrust of ideology that is found in Gundam is understandable.

82
 Certainly the most sympathetic Gundam characters do not follow any sort of

nationalist ideology but rather are most concerned with the well being of those they

know. Gundam characters like Amuro, Kamille, Bernie, and Kira try to extend the

desire to protect those they know to a desire for peace for all by remembering that all

of humankind is made up of individuals that can be known. In the manga, the pilots

fought a phantom enemy and death was of little consequence. In Gundam the

enemy is intimately known as enemy characters constantly communicate with one

another by radio, face to face, or even by communing their thoughts. The

consequences of death are many: the fear of recognizing imminent death, the grief

of a survivor, and even the guilt and horror of the killer.

As the majority of Japanese cannot hate a specific country, the antiwar

message Gundam has to be a universal one. Gundam avoids assigning blame for

particular historical atrocities by creating a historical pastiche where historical events,

places, and people are used as raw materials to create a story that seems truthful but

is not true. Responsibility is assigned but only in the context of the show. It is the

characters who do not seek empathize and understand other individuals, who cannot

trust, who see others as objects to be manipulated that are responsible for the

greatest atrocities in the Gundam world.

To return once again to the idea historical truthfulness, a determination of

whether Gundam is effective as an antiwar message requires a more thorough

analysis of its content than I have done and some audience research. Why does the

audience watch Gundam? How does the audience react to the violence of the

show? Does the audience actually empathize with characters and recognize the

consequences of the violence? Or does the audience become desensitized? Does

83
the audience recognize an ideological message in Gundam? And finally, does

Gundam effect the audience's perception of history? Only by interacting with viewers

can any of these questions be answered.

Leaving the question of the audience alone, looking at the creative personnel

involved with Gundam, particularly Tomino Yoshiyuki, can certainly be explored in far

greater detail than I have done. There is a wealth of material only available in

Japanese that can allow a greater understanding of what they intended to

communicate with Gundam.

As a final thought, Standish (2001) argues that the narrative of the tragic hero

was instrumental in allowing the Japanese come to terms with the defeat in the war.

Ashbaugh (2004) argues that Gundam is a critique of the tragic hero narrative in part

because Gundam shows there is no nobility in dying for a lost cause. I would argue

that Gundam has become an example of the tragic hero narrative and that the noble

cause is peace. Each time a war ends in Gundam and there is peace, a new show

comes along with a new war and a new hero who must try to stop the war. The hero

may not die and may achieve some sort of peace, but often the victory is Pyrrhic and

the peace is temporary. Peace may be a noble cause, but the constraints of the

Gundam genre means it must be unrealizable.

84
Appendix A
Case Number: ___________

Title: ______________________________ Media: ___ Episode #: _________

$ Images of violence
$ Anonymous victims of violence/death o Combatants o Non-combatants o Both o None
$ Images of mass casualties/massacre/genocide o Combatants o Non-combatants o Both o None
$ Images of suicide attacks/attempts/sacrifice o Combatants o Non-combatants o Both o None
$ Images of atrocities (including forced suicide) o Combatants o Non-combatants o Both o None
$ Images of (implied) rape o Combatants o Non-combatants o Both o None
$ Named characters as victims of violence o Yes o No o Family member of main character
$ Major characters as victims of violence o Yes o No o Violent death
$ Images of destruction
$ Effects associated with nuclear destruction o Scale of 1 to 5
$ o Mushroom cloud o Nuclear flash o Shock wave o Radiation o Other (including spoken reference)
$ Other weapons of mass destruction o Yes o No
$ Bombardment
$ o Aerial bombardment o “Shelling” o Sabotage
$ Targeting of military targets o Yes o No
$ Targeting of civilian targets o Yes o No
$ Indiscriminate destruction of civilian targets o Yes o No (“collateral damage”)
$ Impact on noncombatants
$ o noncombatants in combat zone o Starvation/disease o Refugees/orphans o Black markets/prostitution

$ Conflation of war destruction with natural disasters o Yes o No

$ Images of the enemy
$ Enemy stereotypes o Demons/animals o Superhuman o Civilians as combatants o Racism in general
$ Issues of causation of and responsibility for war
$ Addresses causes of war
$ o Competition for natural resources/living space o Economic sanctions o Challenge of hegemony
$ Militarism o Weak civilian control of military o War fever/jingoism o Military involved in politics
$ Hostilities initiated o with a surprise attack o with an unauthorized attack o With a staged attack
$ Addresses personal responsibility (reasons an individual is fighting)
$ Reasons for fighting o Critical of o Ambivalent about o Justifies o Does not address
$ Addresses political responsibility
$ Assigns responsibility to specific individuals o Critical of o Justifies o Ambivalent about
$ Assigns responsibility to systems/structures o Critical of o Justifies o Ambivalent about
$ Responsibility of head of state (“emperor”) o Critical of o Justifies o Ambivalent o Does not address
$ Anti-war movement o As a political faction o War protests o Armed resistance
$ Miscellaneous
$ Use of propaganda/censorship o Critical of o Justifies o Ambivalent about
$ Assassinations/coups o Yes o No
$ Fascist imagery o Yes o No
$ Military cliques or inter-service rivalry o Yes o No
$ Memorialization of casualties o Combatants o Non-combatants o Both o None
$ Colonization o Critical of o Justifies o Ambivalent about o Gives voice to colonized
$ “Comfort women” o Does not address o As ‘normal’ prostitution o As ‘forced’ prostitution o Gives voice to the women
$ Impact on families/friends o Separation o Grief at death of loved one
$ Experiments on human beings o Yes o No

85
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