Read Online Wrong About Japan by Peter Carey - Free Book Online Page B

ni Shutsugen su (“The Science Warrior Appears in New York”). In it, a giant robot with vast spiked feet stamps flat the buildings on Manhattan whilst it puffs steam or smoke or poison from every hinge and hole of its Tin Man body. Though the bomb could not explain the robot, one cannot escape the impotent rage, and even obsession, that the image conjures up. When Commodore Perry broke through the wall that had surrounded Japan for two hundred years, he perhaps engendered passions suggested by the robot, but I kept this notion to myself. Because once I was in Japan, I understood that, as a foreigner, I could never know the truth.
Certainly I saw the effects of World War II in almost every anime we watched, in the continually crumbling cities, in those ever-present preternaturally powerful children who threatened to obliterate the universe, and most particularly in the series Mobile Suit Gundam, whose creator we set off to meet one sunny summer’s day. We were accompanied by my friend from the English Agency, Paul Hulbert and—this was a complete surprise— Takashi, who appeared from behind a newsstand near Asakusa Station. My son immediately brightened.
“Charley, did you invite him?”
“Dad, please. You don’t know what this means to him.”
I looked at Takashi. His tension was palpable, his cheeks a heightened rosy colour. He smiled at me, although what that meant I could not guess.
“But we haven’t asked Mr. Tomino,” I told my son as we boarded the subway. “This interview has taken months to arrange. They’re very formal about all this.”
Poor Takashi was not insensitive to my feelings. On the train he stood a little apart, very erect in his bearing.
“He won’t ask questions, Dad. He just wants to come. Don’t be so mean. Mr. Tomino is his hero.”
I saw his point. If Charley had endured Kabuki for me, I could handle whatever ripples Takashi’s presence might cause. Having resolved that he should come, I was surprised again when, during the short walk from Kichijoji Station to Sunrise Studios, he vanished.
It is the nature of tourism that one returns not only with trinkets and postcards but also with memories of misunderstandings, hurts ignorantly inflicted across the borderlines of language and custom. At Kichijoji Station, it seemed I had acquired one more. As it turned out, however, Takashi Ko, second lieutenant of the third battalion, was simplyunable to confront his creator. Still, the bad taste lingers: social anxiety had made me less generous than I should have been.
Sunrise Studios occupies an office building of no particular charm, and it was not until we entered the second-floor studio that we met the twelve-foot-high plastic robot. Here, at last, I saw my son’s face take on that complete and utter blankness which reveals his deepest secret pleasures. Who could believe we were here? Which of his friends would even believe it possible?
We were led into a meeting room where we were seven in all, one boy and six men, most notably Yoshiyuki Tomino himself, a youthful sixty years of age, slim, balding, with large eyeglasses and that curious combination often seen in artists, an obvious sensitivity linked with a paradoxically unbending will.
My friend Paul brought to the table not only extraordinary fluency in Japanese, a highly educated literary sensibility but also an intimate familiarity with manga.
In addition, there was Irie-san, a senior editor of Kodansha, the giant publishing firm that produced much of the printed material, some of it physically immense, generated by Mobile Suit Gundam. He was a man with an untidy mop of hair and suchobvious kindness and intelligence that it was with him more than anyone I met that I felt my lack of language most acutely.
There were also two Sunrise executives whose cards I have, typically but regretfully, since lost. For some doubtless simple reason, everyone at this meeting was Mr., never san.
Charley had bought one of Mr. Tomino’s books to be