Term · Anime culture
Mecha
A teenager, a cockpit, and forty tonnes of walking machine that is somehow their emotional problem to solve.
In Otakana the clue reads: Genre of giant piloted robots
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- 5 · Normal
Mecha comes from the English word mechanical, clipped to meka in Japanese, and in Japan it covers machinery in a show generally: vehicles, weapons, the props department. Abroad it hardened into one meaning, the giant piloted robot, and the genre it names is one of the few that Japanese animation invented rather than imported.
Go Nagai's Mazinger Z in 1972 put a pilot inside the robot instead of controlling it by remote, which is the decision the whole genre rests on. Seven years later Yoshiyuki Tomino's Mobile Suit Gundam recast the machines as mass-produced military hardware, gave the war two sides with arguments, and split the genre in half. Super robots run on willpower. Real robots run out of fuel.
Evangelion took it somewhere else again in 1995, where the machine is barely a machine and piloting it costs the child doing it. The commercial engine underneath all three is the model kit. Bandai has sold hundreds of millions of Gunpla kits since 1980, which is why a series can afford to introduce a new variant design roughly every four episodes.
Spelling MECHA
MECHA is five letters, and the CH is where guesses go wrong. Japanese メカ is two beats, me-ka, with a hard K sound, so a spelling like MEKA feels right to anyone going by ear. Hepburn writes the softer version that English adopted, giving MECHA. There is no doubled letter and no long vowel, so five tiles cover it.