There are two unavoidable topics when talking about sports-themed Japanese cartoons: baseball and Adachi Mitsuru. Baseball is America’s past time, but baseball here is nowhere the ’serious business’ it is in Japan. Oh sure, we have famous Hatfield-McCoy feud between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox or even the inter-league rivalries like Chicago’s White Sox and Cubs, but how many Cubs fans would jump into Lake Michigan if the team superstition meant it would help their chances in the play-offs and win a World Series? Cheering in an American stadium is nothing like the large flags, towels and team fight songs which are waved and bellowed more and more drunkenly as the game goes on. Every baseball game in Japan is played and cheered there like it’s October here. Yes, baseball in Japan is different than it is here; it was an import in the late Taisho period (late 1910s - early 1920s) but has distinctively grown into its own very Japanese phenomenon.

Adachi Mitsuru, likewise, is a name that is dropped in nearly every conversation when talking about sports anime. He’d been doing manga art since the early 1970s and by the close of the decade was writing his own narrative, usually about sports, youth and romance all wrapped up together. Today’s article isn’t about his first or last work but one that is typically lauded as his best. The story of twins, their neighbor, and a childhood dream simply called Touch.

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A play on words from the second Mobile Suit Gundam movie, Soldiers of Sorrow, I heavily considered calling this article the Alternate Universes of Sorrow, truly displaying my bias affection for the original Universal Century. Instead, this title present a much more neutral view, which I think is important for Gundam fans especially, to look at the Alternate Universes from a neutral standpoint. Just as each universe is varied in setting, characterization and mobile suit design each is its own mixed bag that can be filed under ‘win’ and ‘fail’. Unlike many of the contemporaries of Mobile Suit Gundam and its franchise through the 1980s and early 1990s, there are probably only two others who’ve met success as a  franchise and not touched the ‘alternate universes’ concept. While many may consider the very idea of a work with a continuing, linear story to include tangential side-stories to be a vehicle for driving a soulless, capitalist machine, the inclusion of alternate universes of Gundam have demonstrated the pliability of the some of Gundam’s core concepts, a fresh look at the old franchise, and some things that may have sounded good in a staffing meeting but when finally presented to the public, just simply fell flat.

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When I was asked to be a contributing writer at Gaijinside, I was originally asked about writing about mecha anime. After all, it was immediately after a panel that myself and fellow Akihabara Renditions co-host / Gaijinside contributor, Richard Hoelsher had put together about the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise at Anime Weeked Atlanta XIV back in September of this year. Don’t get me wrong, I like my giant robot cartoons; but as I was mulling ideas around for mecha articles to write, I began thinking about other titles from a completely un-related genre: sports. I pitched the idea and here we are with a new Gaijinside feature - The Sports Pages.

(Editor’s Note: I read and published out of order, but the introduction works well either way. My bad!)

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No mention of giant robots, let alone robots of the more “realistic” persuasion, can hardly be made without mentioning Mobile Suit Gundam. It is arguably the most prolific franchise with animation productions, comics, novels, toys, models and untold other numbers of merchandise that fans will invariably spend their money on for almost three decades now. In fact, trying to cover the entire franchise in one article is awfully ambitions and, I’m afraid, cannot be done to do it justice. So, we’ll consider this the first of three parts.

Mobile Suit Gundam solidified the “real robot” genre which didn’t involve aliens from space, spirits or gods embodied in robots or wacky bell-bottoms. The real robot genre features robots as the tools of war, human conflict in said war and, particularly in Gundam’s case, the stench of death that permeates through war. It keeps some tropes of the genre - the idea of teenager pilots - and puts spins on them that aren’t entirely unrealistic (in most cases).

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There are a lot of stereotypes about Japanese animation. First, there are the big eyes and small mouths. More negatively, people immediately think of schoolgirls being raped by giant tentacle monsters. But if there are two stereotypes about Japanese animation and comics that are almost unique to the respective mediums, it’s magical girls and giant robots. And here is your weekly dose of said robots.

If one were to speculate as to why robots became popular in Japanese animation, I’d argue that it was because of market successes from shows like Tetsuwan Atom and Tetsujin 28-gou (each known respectively as Astro Boy and Gigantor in North America) in the 1960s. One could probably argue that hokey science fiction films, especially those of the 1950s that were exported to Japan, could have also nurtured a few ideas to spin themselves into an entire sub-genre of science fiction animation, which would further break itself down into sub-sub-genres over the next four decades.

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Apparently beating Drew is an efficient way of getting these edited.

(hint: SAVE AS)

Several hours of me bitching about anime and its horrible fans in my shrill and irritating voice. Now available at akibaren.blogspot.com

http://akibaren.blogspot.com

Please note that this episode will be terrible as I had important nonsense to deal with at the time of recording. Please direct all hate mail to Drew.