Mobile Suit Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino spoke at Seien Girls’ High School last month after being contacted on behalf of a student passionate about Gundam. She and her fellow students wanted industry figures to share how to make dreams come true, with their wish eventually reaching Tomino.
Delivering the speech “To Live on a Finite Earth -Thinking about the Future-,” Tomino spoke for 90 minutes to a hall of students and even their parents, many of whom were in their youth when Mobile Suit Gundam premiered nearly 46 years ago in April 1979.
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One of the questions addressed to Tomino included his view on life and death, to which he replied:
“Death is within my reach. I think it’s a good thing to be able to face death peacefully. I want to face death head-on. Rather than leaving something tangible behind, I’ve come to think that I want to create something that can be passed on to the next generation. It may not be something that connects with people now, but the next generation should understand it. I believe that the message of ‘Reconguista in G’ will have been conveyed 30 years from now. I hope that the future will be different from the Earth today.”
Readers can check out Seien’s blog for Tomino’s other interesting comments, which include his influences and the need to expose oneself to great authors.
While Tomino wants to face death head-on, he said last year that he had no confidence in himself that he does yet. In an interview featured in Quarterly Magazine Mimi No. 186 (Summer 2024), he said, “Death is something that should be accepted, and living things die when they are born. Why does human wisdom consider life to be the only good? I want to be someone who can accept death… but even at 82 years old, I still have no confidence in myself (via @Char_Tweet on X).”
During Tomino’s appearance at Seien, he was also asked how to convey difficult topics to people, to which he emphasized patience. He struggles with it personally, but believes that while people may not be ready to understand something now, they might in the future.
Nevertheless, in an interview for V Gundam‘s 30th anniversary in 2023, he said he lost hope that humanity would evolve past what he views as a stagnant energy-dependent lifestyle, unchanged for the last 1000 years. Humanity’s evolution into Newtypes has been a common theme in his work. “However,” he caveated, “when considering the history of humanity and the world order after Putin’s war, today’s 10-year-olds will grow up experiencing this peculiar warfare.
They will have a completely different experience growing up compared to the previous generations who experienced the Vietnam War and the Cold War, so humanity might start to change a bit from here on (via Zeonic Republic).”
This was the case in Reconguista in G, where Bellri and Aida developed new worldviews as a result of the conflicts they were thrust into. These contrasted with the worldviews of previous generations. His other comments included criticisms of Putin, a retrospective on V Gundam, his realizations after visiting Europe, and a discussion of race and gender diversity in his series.
Following his presentation, Tomino gratefully accepted flowers from the Seien students. In addition to getting one of the most acclaimed creatives to come to their school, the students even managed to do what Macross creator Shoji Kawamori could not (However, Tomino likely did end up accepting them too).
Source: Seien Girls’ High School Principal’s Blog
Featured image: Gundam Info, ©SOTSU, SUNRISE ©SOTSU, SUNRISE, MBS ©SOTSU, SUNRISE, TV TOKYO © Bandai Namco Filmworks Inc.
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