The G Reco cap that Tomino worn during the event won’t be commercialized.

I edited the post as I added more tweets and found a partial transcription here. It’s by Inuyou, a nice person who often drew Mouretsu Pirates pics when the show was airing.I think I covered everything I could find now.

Tomino was invited the 27th of August 2015 at the Gundam Café for an event. The Sunrise producer of G Reco, Ogata Naohiro(nicknamed Ogata P) was present along with Bell’s seiyuu Ishii Mark. Yoshida Kenichi was supposed to attend too but he had last minute circumstances. They talked about Gundam in general. It was streamed online but it was blocked outside Japan so I didn’t watch it. On twitter # Gレコ, there’s some impressions and quotes by Tomino picked by people who watched the event. I mainly picked stuff from this account. Instead of going through the twitter tag, you can also find all the related tweets on matome sites like here. I’m too lazy to link every single tweet I translated.

My own comments are under parenthesis.

“There’s toilets because you’d want to go to the toilet and it can’t be helped.”

“People don’t grow up if they stay in friendly lukewarm environments”

Yoshida once said Bellri is called like that because he’s the child who RINGS THE BELL (to warn you about the problems tackled in the show)

“I always disliked Ishii kun’s voice.” (Tomino stuck the troll throttle on full throttle)

“One cup of whisky per week keeps the doctor away” (Suuuuure.)

“Whenever I start working, I go mad in my own fantasy world around 30 minutes later.”

“I keep looking at AKB girl’s legs. The space between their knees and their skirts” (so the zettai ryouki)

Tomino thinks G Reco failed because it didn’t become as popular as AKB48. (That’s a bad way of gauging things. Maybe he doesn’t know that their sales are so high because some people buy 500 copies or more of the same single.)

Tomino said he’s impressed by Furuya Tohru and how he can still voice Amuro that well after all these years.(He still sounds great in SRW too)

“While there’s some characters I want to reject completely by their designs, Yoshida’s work on G Reco is 75-80 points. It’s lukewarm.”

Tomino’s favorite design in the show are the spacesuits. (I love them too, it’s always hilarious how they can’t zip the crotch area.)

“I’d like to keep trying hard at work a bit more”. (A lot of fans on twitter think this means there will be G Reco compilation movies. I think so as well.)

Ishii: “I’m really happy to have worked on G Reco”.

“There’s a person who’s the copyright holder of Gundam…” Then Tomino looked at the producer, and the producer told him “please don’t look at me”. Then Tomino added that if he still was the copyright holder, this Gundam Café they’re currently in for the event wouldn’t even exist.

“In G Reco, the definition of a Newtype is being aware of your surroundings and acknowledging your relationships. Being modest, reasonable and with individuality.”

“I don’t think people who post on 2ch are THAT stupid.”

“They should keep in mind that a Newtype holds wisdom and act accordingly”

“As long as you don’t become a criminal, I think you had a successful life”

A lot of people on Twitter said that while saying these lines, Tomino was looking directly at the camera. And that he was trying to encourage NEETs to stop staying home forever and go out.

“I want to go climb Mt Fuji”

“I think I failed raising G Reco. It doesn’t align with my ideals. I’m sorry.” (In Nolife’s interview he said the same thing)

Bell’s seiyuu and Tomino get along very well. He doesn’t think Ishii kun is special though. At a point, Ishii kun said that Tomino is a “veeery niiiice grandfather”. That was tweeted by dozens of persons at the same time saying how cute it is etc.

“Turn A is around 500 years before G Reco”.

“The G Lucifer has a functioning Moonlight Butterfly. The technology was preserved and inherited after Turn A. I like to think that hopefully no one crazy like in Turn A’s era will pop up to misuse it”. (G LUCIFER CONFIRMED FOR HAVING MOONLIGHT BUTTERFLY.)

“I hate anime with bad animation” (He said the same in Nolife’s interview I posted about.)

“Gundam shows made by other people are crap, including Origin.”

I’m too lazy to link every single tweet for the other quotes, but I guess this is the most controversial statement so I’ll post some for it.

Source tweet 1

Source tweet 2

Source tweet 3

Source tweet 4

“I’m the one who gave the go sign to Imagawa to make G Gundam. It was supposed to be a breakthrough, but it ended up being whatever.”

“Why is there Gundam shows where they don’t show the mouths moving when they talk.” Producer Ogata apologized to Tomino for that.

On Seed(or 00): “There’s no way a beautiful woman with a big chest would be a battleship captain”.

“I sold the rights for Gundam, so of course I can understand other people are making shows too, but it’s painful and I can’t watch them. But in a sense thanks to this my view broadened.”

“Sometimes I force myself to watch them, but I can only last 5 minutes.”

Source tweet 1

Source tweet 2

They also talked about scenes in particular in G Reco, and showed some animation sheets etc. You can find the pictures on the net.

About these statements criticizing other shows: Almost every Japanese fan on twitter was like “yes, that’s the usual Tomino, nice to see he’s in good health” etc when he said that and just laughed it off. People only got shocked when he said that Turn A is around 500 years before G Reco. I don’t think you should care that a Japanese old man doesn’t like the same Chinese robot cartoons you do.

Translation of the partial transcript:

(At first I only wanted to summarize it, but it’s really funny to read so I translated almost everything line by line.)

During the Q&A, someone asked Tomino san to give more details about the relation between G Reco and Turn A. Ogata san, the producer, started answering, talking about how G Reco is before Turn A, but that’s when Tomino san interrupted him and said that “Turn A is around 500 years before G Reco”. Ogata san was shocked:

Ogata: But Turn A is the furthest away in the Gundam chronology.

Tomino: No, that’s wrong.

Ogata: It’s wrong!? But this means everything in the booklets and stuff is actually wrong…

Ishii: They’re just wrong then.

People laugh in the audience.

Ishii: I’m happy to hear everyone is still with us.

Ogata: This will create a panic in the studio.

Ishii: It will.

Tomino: Why is everyone thinking that way?

Ogata: Well because it always seemed so.

Tomino: Turn A looks like it’s the furthest away because of the simplistic setting of the “black history”.

Ogata: Yes yes.

Tomino: But that was just Turn A’s era black history!

Ogata: Do you mean there’s something like a time loop?

Tomino: That’s not it!

Ogata: It’s not?

People laugh in the audience.

Tomino: When speaking from a viewpoint considering Turn A’s “black history”…

Ogata: If you look at it that way, it seems like G Reco takes place 1000 years after UC ended.

Tomino: Yes.

Ogata: So this means Turn A is even further away from G Reco chronologically speaking. I mean, Turn A feels like a story in a future where UC was a looong time ago.

Tomino: Not really. It seems that way?

Ogata: Yes it does.

Tomino: Eeeeh. That’s weird.

Ogata: It wasn’t supposed to feel that way?

Tomino: I definitely didn’t want it to feel that way.

Ogata: So Turn A is actually before G Reco?

Tomino: Around 500 years before.

Ogata: Around 500 years…

Ishii: Eeeeh… Is there reactions about this? (The producer Ogata was looking at twitter and the net during all the event to check reactions)

Ogata: This will really mess up the timeline.

People laugh in the audience.

Ogata then sees Yoshida’s tweet saying that he already knew that Turn A is before G Reco. He tells the others.

Tomino: We didn’t even talk about it before!

Ogata&Ishii: Eeeeeeh.

Tomino: This shows the fact that someone just decided this by themselves. (he literally said “someone” but he means himself)

Ogata: That’s right.

Tomino: But he(Yoshida) didn’t tweet something like “Tomino you bastard”, so everything’s fine!!

Ogata: Direction wise were you planning to do this from the start?

Tomino: Well of course.

Ogata: I see…

Ogata, facing the audience: apparently he was planning to do it from the start.

Tomino: If I wasn’t planning for it, I wouldn’t have put amazing stuff in G Reco like the Crescent Ship. Was there anything of the Crescent Ship’s technology level in Turn A? It means they couldn’t have done it in Turn A’s era.

Ogata: I see.

Tomino: It’s the same for all the basic technologies and energy levels. Oh and the biggest reason why Turn A (the mecha) doesn’t show up, is because Turn A is based on a powerful backbone. Without it you can’t just recreate it. In a sense, Turn A was somehow made by accumulating malice from all of the previously existing Gundams. That’s what I thought of when choosing the name Turn A. It was to show that it’s a bunch of things lumped together, and to show that Turn A is a step away, time period wise and mental structure wise.

Tomino: So then! When I was racking my brains very hard about what to do with G Reco, I thought I had no other choice than to jump 200 or 300 years, so I jumped 1000 years. If I skip 1000 years, not only I can get away from Gundam’s chronological order and history, but I’ll also have enough time behind for the backbone of my own story.

(This is almost the same thing he said in Nolife’s interview I posted about)

Tomino: Then, I decided to make it into an anime that makes people think about today’s realistic problems, and threw in every problem I could think of. This is something other Gundam shows haven’t done before. (He said this in the other interview too)

Ishii: I see.

Tomino: Gundam shows until Turn A included, only talk about Gundam itself.

Ishii: That’s true yeah.

Tomino: G Reco is the first to break away from this, and is the first anime to finally tackle real life’s problems. As opposed to what the Chinese army is doing lol.

(Aaah so that was the chinese army joke, I didn’t get it at first since there’s no context in the tweets I first translated. Thankfully Inuyou explainded it in his transcript. Tomino said that because on August 23rd, China announced there will be an “anti Japanese victory” military parade in September, and for the time being did a small demonstration of it. And apparently the female soldiers’ parade was very “anime” like. It’s weird Tomino mocks China like that though, as judging from the other interview he knows Abe and the current Japanese government is no better.)

Tomino: Getting back to what we were talking before the Q&A.

Ogata:You mean the women’s “that”. (According to Inuyou, they had already talked about the parade before)

Tomino: They picked women for the parade and made them do stuff you would only see in an anime. I thought it was very cruel of them.

Ogata: Yeah.

Tomino: So anyway as I was saying, I couldn’t do this kind of realistic talk with Turn A, so I wanted to do it with G Reco. But then it turned out to be pretty anime like too, in fact I’d even say child like, with the heroes beings kids. It feels like a toy. I think that because of this toy-like feel, G Reco holds more power as a show than Turn A. It probably looks like a cheap story though.

Ogata:… I think I’ll have a panic attack.

Ishii: Hahaha.

Ogata: Well thank you… There’s a lot of things I want to think over, and I think everyone here will keep in mind what they heard today.

Tomino, with a big smile: Well then everyone, feel free to debate about all that for the next 2-3 months. I think it would be a good thing if you could make a Gundam complete history. And when doing it, if you put G Reco where I said it stands time-wise, I will be very happy.

According to Inuyou(the person who posted this partial transcription), if they do it just like the previous event, starting next month, this event will be viewable via Gundam Channel’s smartphone application. Apparently it takes time to wrap up the paperwork. So unless someone recorded the event and uploaded it, we’ll only get to see it then.

Inuyou’s opinion about what Tomino said, is that Tomino didn’t reject the background made by other people about the black history of Turn A. I share the same opinion. He doesn’t reject it but doesn’t accept it either, and just had his own background in mind as well, and it’s perfectly fine. All of this explains what he meant when he said in Nolife’s intreview that “the Reguild Century was first supposed to be a sequel to Universal Century, but it didn’t turn out like that. Everyone should think of the meaning behind those words”

In any case, this isn’t really a retcon, since he planned to do it from the start. This is really fun and I’m looking forward to seeing people who obsess over canon getting mad. A lot of Japanese authors don’t really care about canon, best example of this is Leiji Matsumoto. (I always try to be Japanese like and put the family name first, so I should say Matsumoto Leiji, but it’s not his real name anyway so I don’t do it. Same thing with Go Nagai.)

Previously I said that this paper, released when G Reco started, already said that G Reco is after Turn A, it was a mistranslation on my part. I am sorry. (It’s complicated to explain but has to do with how I translated 前 as “devant” in French in my head, and when speaking about a timeline, depending of the context it can mean both before or after.)

Staff reactions:

Gyoubu Ippei: “I think it’s wonderful that the giant wall saying that “every Gundam work leads to Turn A” was just swept away like that. It’s like we’re back before Turn A existed now and there’s no ending anymore. The fact that Tomino changed that shows once more how G Reco is a work that looks towards the future. I think things are more fun this way. “

Akiman: “So G Self is actually the strongest in history?”. (Then a lot of people jokingly congratulated him for designing the possibly strongest Gundam without even knowing it.)

Yoshida: “I’d too would give myself 80 points for the chara design. But sadly for my job as animation director I’d give myself a 30.” Then he also tweeted that he noticed that G Reco is after Turn A.

Edit as of November 2016: If I knew I’d be the only person who would cover the event in English, and get into a spotlight, I wouldn’t have posted about it here. Back then I thought big news site like ANN would post about the event right away anyway, but they didn’t. As a consequence, these translations of mine got linked in many Gundam online communities as the source of the info. I checked a lot of them, and it’s incredible how mad some people got about G Reco being after Turn A. It’s like they got told Tomino both killed their cat and ate their fries when they were kids. And let’s not even start about some very rude comments I saw directed at myself. I know there’s a lot of stupid kids who don’t use their brain on the net so these didn’t bother me much. What’s disheartening is to see people get so worked up over cartoons. At least it taught me that a lot of Gundam fans worldwide are stupid. It’s sad. I noticed this when I used to spend time on /m/, (not that everyone there is stupid, just a majority) but I thought at least people on other places of the internet were less stupid. I never thought it was this bad. Some people are literal fanatics.