―In your newest Gundam production, the TV anime Gundam Reconguista in G, you adopted the idea of a space elevator, and, as you mentioned in one of your Japanese interviews, you are also trying to shed the concept of “Newtype.” Where do all these new ideas and challenges come from? What’s the source of your creative urge?
T: I’m a person who can’t make a story in an anime, manga, or novel kind of way, which is why everything real is my motivation.
―Reality is your motivation?
T: For instance, letting the people who came up with the foolish idea of a space elevator know the extent of their foolishness by making them go ”What the…?!” Or using my feelings toward certain things such as “What’s with the present political system and international situation?!” as motivation and launch a counterattack against them.
―A counterattack.
T: See, I don’t think you can make something like that space elevator in reality. I thought, if we were to make it in the real world, it could only come into existence in the form I showed in Gundam Reconguista in G. I want to say, “Did you think about the transportation infrastructure for making the space elevator? Of course you didn’t. It’s fine as long as it goes to space. That’s stupid!”
—
As I worked on Gundam Reconguista in G, I started to think about the global economy as a system. So I described the Capital Tower and in the middle of all that there is a means to gather all the funds. The result of this is that the Earth is not tainted by this system, whereas for us it is obviously spread across the world now. That said, the economy is something that is very important. Nowadays we talk about free market capitalism but where does this kind of capitalism come from? So I studied it. If you talk about free market capitalism you mean things like the stock market and there is no way to stop that. The real thing though is that there doesn’t appear to be any ‘real’ money involved, it’s almost an imaginary type of money. So how did this all begin. Last year I came across a book by Max Weber called The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I learned that capitalism came about by quite a moral and Christian set of ideals, that it was based around undertaking trade via things like guilds. From there it developed onward into what we have today. So very serious and hard working people made this system but now it has changed into free market capitalism, which isn’t the same as the original form. Obviously, it’s not the time to talk about idealism if we want to continue to live on this planet for the foreseeable future. We have to find a way though and if I were able to figure this out then I would become a real Newtype.
-Yoshiyuki Tomino, in conversation with Tokyo Otaku Mode News and Forbes
