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Culture

Baffling GPM Anime from JAXA PAO

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
October 22, 2013
Filed under , ,

Keith’s note: This incomprehensible anime video from JAXA seems to be about some bratty nerd girls who wear NASA and JAXA jackets, get into cat fights, get married, and work on the Joint NASA/JAXA GPM mission or something like that. Yes, I know there are subtitles, and (minimal) narration in Japanese, but the pictures tell an odd narrative. But it looks cool.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

20 responses to “Baffling GPM Anime from JAXA PAO”

  1. spacecadette says:
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    Probably more comprehensible for those who understand Japanese.

    I don’t, but I liked it anyway. But then I do like anime.

  2. cynical_space says:
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    Subtitles would have helped, but it wasn’t a bad video.

    If JAXA really wanted to push space via anime, they should make a deal with the producers of Space Brothers to show that. SB is a wonderfully uplifting series demonstrating how the space program inspires people around the world. It reminds me why I got into the space business in the first place and how I felt as a kid watching space activities on TV.

    • HyperJ says:
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      This video had subtitles… At least when viewing on a Windows machine using Chrome.

      But yeah… Odd. 🙂

  3. Dante says:
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    Not a particular fan of the bickering, but good to see NASA/JAXA continuing to expand their presence into Anime and other pop-culture.

    Space Brothers in particular is 80 episodes strong, and paints a pretty decent light on both agencies and their respective Astronaut corps.

    …and yeah, knowing Japanese helps, or at least having English subtitles.

  4. Wendy Yang says:
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    From the tiny amount of Japanese I know, the translation subtitles are a bit off. The girl is using GPM data to check whether or not it will be sunny on the day of the wedding of her friend, which is coincidentally that day (hence the bicycle rush and hitting a cat).

    A while back there is a drawing contest on designing an anime character for GPM. More than a few decade back there are wonderful Saturday Morning Cartoons space documentary.

  5. cynical_space says:
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    OK. so I re-watched it with closed captioning turned on, which did show the subtitles.

    It looks like the short haired girl is part of the Japanese Ops team for the GPM mission, or maybe specifically for the Duel Frequency Precipitation Radar, which seems to be the main focus of the video. It appears that her sister is about to get married.

    The girl with the glasses and the funky hairdo is a visitor from NASA and they get into an argument for some reason. But they make up and the Japanese girl invites her new friend to the wedding.

    They show the DFPR in the final stages of I&T and being shipped to Japan for integration and launch,

    Once in orbit, and the wedding approaches, it looks like there is a big storm threatening to ruin the festivities. She is crazily working the Ops console (doing who knows what with the instrument – maybe showing off some the wonderful data they will be to take?), and the storm is over and wedding day will be beautiful.

    She recklessly rides her bike to the wedding and is told by her new friend she heeds to wear better clothes for the wedding. Then there is a splash screen saying that the DFPR is going to change how we look at weather. Or something…

    Anyway, that is the video in a nutshell. A pleasant little PR piece about the DFPR.

    EDIT: Looking at the NASA site for GPM, I got a few of the details wrong. The DPR is a Japanese instrument and its the spacecraft which is shipped to Japan for final integration and launch out of Tanegashima on an HII-A. Latest NASA info says launch is early 2014.

  6. mfwright says:
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    I find it baffling and incomprehensible, I wonder if Japanese (or Americans) find our space videos the same? Overall it looks like a good way to draw interest from anime fans, they may become curious about the satellite functions and all that stuff on computer screens, and take time to google it.

    • mfwright says:
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      I sent link to this video to a friend who replied,

      “This is typical Japanese animation setup. Cute young super talented girl works in top research for space or any super high tech project.

      The DPR is probably a real new high tech weather radar satellite Japan just developed. This animation just present one of its “everyday use” via high quality cute Japanese style animation story telling.

      The argument between Japanese cute flat chested young girl scientist and the sexy more mature and endowed USA NASA lady scientist symbolize the relationship between USA and Japan in a cooperative but with ‘constructive arguments in details’ from time to time situation.”

      • kcowing says:
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        Yea that’s sort of what I thought was going on … I still wonder why they all have huge eyeballs.

        • cynical_space says:
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          The large eyes are a hallmark of “anime style”. It has always been there and anime fans have come to expect it, although there is certainly some variation across the anime spectrum. Another quirk is that often times , the younger a person is, the larger their eyes. So, small children will have really big eyes and elderly characters will have very small eyes. This is by no means a hard and fast rule, however.

          The large eye style started with Japanese animators in the late 1940’s and 1950’s as they liked, and imitated, ironically enough, the larger eyes of the characters of none other than Walt Disney! I guess it’s an example of what goes around, comes around. 🙂

        • shan22044 says:
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          From Wikipedia – A common anime character design convention is exaggerated eye size. The animation of characters with large eyes in anime can be traced back to Osamu Tezuka, who was deeply influenced by such early animation characters as Betty Boop, who was drawn with disproportionately large eyes. Tezuka is a central figure in anime and manga history, whose iconic art style and character designs allowed for the entire range of human emotions to be depicted solely through the eyes.

          Cultural anthropologist Matt Thorn argues that Japanese animators and audiences do not perceive such stylized eyes as inherently more or less foreign.However, not all anime have large eyes. For example, the works of Hayao Miyazaki and Toshiro Kawamoto are known for having realistically proportioned eyes, as well as realistic hair colors on their characters.

          Also – “Anime, as it currently is, is traced back to Osamu Tezuka. We should look at the decisions he made when he first started to animate as the basis of the visual characteristics. As Sanchez has noted, Tezuka used the influences he had as a child to make his first drawings. He felt that large heads and expressive faces were going to be very important to his stories.’The unusually large eyes especially were of note, as Tezuka wanted to be able to display a range of emotions for his characters, and felt that large eyes were essential to achieving this.’ (Sanchez)”

  7. shan22044 says:
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    I sent to a teenager who is VERY into anime.
    Here is their response:
    “haha I thought it was cool. It looked well made and the voice acting was good. The very very beginning was a little weird, but I got it at the end. I thought it was cool, it could be like those animes where it’s all strategizing and ‘action’ stuff. I didn’t know Japan had its own agency.”

  8. NASAdude says:
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    This anime makes lots of sense, if you are Japanese. The protagonist is a dedicated young woman whose intensity of effort and dedication to the mission results in success: predicting clear weather using DFPR. Her dedication to the JAXA/NASA mission comes before everything, even a family wedding. This sense of dedication to work permeates the culture and is why Japan achieves high levels of quality level in its goods and services.

    Comments on the catfight are correct. When dealing with a foreigner, you are bound to have conflicts. Especially when foreigners speak directly and over-confidently, which sometimes comes off as arrogant and like they know everything. The NASA lady apologizes for her cultural error (and the fight).

    Note that the credits include “Cooperation and Data/Materials” from NASA. Did NASA really do anything for this?