Japan Has Said Goodbye to Its Life-Sized Gundam
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A little over 3 years after it made its stomping debut, the mechanized, moving real-scale replica of the original legendary Gundam in Yokohama is no more. But Bandai sent out its walking, talking giant robot with a bang—and a tribute that paid homage to Gundam’s past and present.
The 18 meter tall, life-sized replica of the classic RX-78-2 Gundam—the original main mobile suit of the 1979 anime—originally opened to the public at the Yokohama Gundam Base in Tokyo Bay in December 2020, and was announced as part of the celebrations the year prior for Mobile Suit Gundam’s 40th anniversary.
While there are several statues of true-scale replicas of the franchise’s giant robots in Japan, the Yokohama Gundam was the first of its scale to feature advanced mechanics—36 moving parts in total—that allowed the mobile suit to perform rudimentary movements from its framework display, including kneeling, walking in place, and moving its arms and head. But after extending its intended exhibition length twice beyond its originally planned 2022 closure—in part spurred by the impacts of the covid-19 pandemic and due to overwhelming demand to the attraction, which saw nearly 2 million visits during its run—the Yokohama Gundam has moved for the last time.
Bandai sent the Gundam out in style last night with one final exhibition, which featured luminaries from across the franchise’s history—including a few words from Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino—as well as a combined fireworks and drone display that lit up Tokyo Bay with moving recreations of key moments from the franchise’s history, such as Amuro’s duel with Char at the climax of the original Gundam, the famous “Last Shooting” pose depicting the Gundam’s final moments in the series before its destruction, and depictions of several major characters from across the franchise’s now 45-year history, including notable wives Suletta Mercury and Miorine Rembran, the protagonists of The Witch From Mercury. The final startup sequence for the Gundam can be seen in the video above.
While the Yokohama Gundam is no more, there are still several life-sized robotic tributes to Mobile Suit Gundam across Japan. Across Tokyo Bay in Odaiba there’s the transforming Unicorn Gundam statue, which replaced a replica of the RX-78-2 in 2017, and more recently the RX-93FFν Gundam—a new iteration of the iconic Nu Gundam piloted by Amuro in Char’s Counterattack—which opened in 2022 at Mitsui Shopping Park LaLaport in Fukuoka. Time will tell if another giant Gundam will come to Japan, but for now, it’s goodbye to the country’s most famous attempt to bring the dream of a life-sized functional extrapolation of humanity’s capacity to commit violence on its own form to reality.
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