Gundam is a nearly 40-year-old franchise of animated TV shows, movies, comics, and video games from Japan. Each piece of media centers around a teen pilot who must pilot an enormous (and super cool) robot in order to save humanity. And for fans of the Gundam multiverse, the most intense place you can geek out is Gundam Base Tokyo, a newly remodeled hub that is the cultural and commercial center of the franchise.
Two years ago, I visited the attraction back when it was called Gundam Front Tokyo. At the time, it cost a small fee (¥1,200, about $10 at the time) to get into the Gundam Base to watch movies and learn about how Gundam plastic models, the DIY kits based on the franchise’s lovingly detailed mecha designs, are made at Bandai’s Shizuoka factory. Shopping for model kits or accessories, eating at the Gundam Cafe, and posing out front with the enormous 1:1 statue, which depicted how the franchise’s most classic mecha, RX-78-2, would look if it existed in real life, was free.
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Gundam Front Tokyo shut down for remodeling in April 2017, and at the same time, the 1:1 Gundam statue went down. In late 2017, the franchise’s oldest Gundam model was replaced by one of its newest, the titular Unicorn Gundam from the 2016 TV series. Now, the top floor of Odaiba’s Diver City Mall is home not to Gundam Front, but to Gundam Base. It’s a complete visual redesign, and notably, it is now completely free for arguably the same experience.
Arriving at Diver City, I could immediately see crowds gathering around the 1:1 Gundam, which stands 19.7 meters (64.6 feet) tall. If the Unicorn Gundam existed in real life, it would be to these exact proportions. One thing that makes it particularly special, especially compared to the former statue, is that it is capable of a transformation sequence. Several times a day, the flat white statue, “Unicorn Mode” electronically converts to “Destroy Mode” in a light show. When it happened, there were audible oohs and ahhs from the crowd, an enthusiastic reaction I thought only actually happened in the movies.
Behind the Gundam statue, there’s a trailer and a cafe where you can buy limited-edition goods and snacks (I grabbed a “Strike Freedom” soda, which is basically a blue soda that is special only for its namesake, the Gundam Strike Freedom from the TV show Gundam SEED). Then, it was time to check out the main attraction on the seventh floor, the newly redone Gundam Base.
The first thing I saw when I entered was an art exhibit inspired by Gundam kits. Bandai gave kits to dozens of artists and gave them carte blanche to transform them however they wanted, leading to some truly eye-catching kits. Following that, there’s a museum depicting all of the grades and scales of Gundam kits that have ever been created—and yes, each and every one of them is for sale here, from the first ‘80s kits to exclusives specifically for April 2018.
Gundam Base Tokyo is similar to Gundam Front Tokyo—there are areas where you can take your photo with characters from the show. There’s a museum for looking at every Gundam model kit ever made. There’s a place you can sit down and build Gundam kits, and even a professional booth where you can have artisans paint and style your model kits for you. Over the past couple of years, the Gundam franchise has gone meta, focusing heavily on shows that don’t center on pilots caught in tragic interstellar wars, but on Gundam fans who build their own kits and use a sci-fi mechanism to battle with them. In that same vein, much of Gundam Base isn’t about older shows or kits, but on the art and craft of making your own models.
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It helps that a new Gundam show just started airing this month. Called Gundam Build Divers, it features middle schoolers playing an MMORPG about the Gundam universe. It’s for fans, by fans, about fans, echoing the Gundam Base’s meta focus. While the previous Gundam Front focused on the older series, depicting detailed dioramas and hourly films about some of Gundam’s earliest shows, Gundam Base is about building your own adventures.
But mostly, it’s about shopping. If you’re a fan of the Marvel universe, for example, you know just how pricey some of these exclusive products for fans can get. For example, at Strict-G, the Gundam brand’s high-end clothing store where dress shirts and jackets with subtle nods to Gundam can have price tags up to ¥50,000 ($466 or so), my husband bought a silk tie with a discreet Gundam pattern which he fully intends to wear to work. The products go from upscale to downright cheap, because it isn’t costing Bandai all that much to re-release prehistoric model kits from the ‘80s, which many fans will buy purely to have complete collections.
Yes, Gundam Base Tokyo is a store first, tourist attraction second. And yes, the redesign has taken a turn toward the recursive, focusing less on the TV and movies that fans fell in love with and more on the toys that are based on those original properties. But when it was time for the light show and I was standing in a crowd of hundreds of Gundam fans, many of whom had come just as far as I had to see it, it was easy to feel a deep connection to the community that’s formed around the franchise I love.
