Quirky Asia Files + Nerd News: Japan's Gundam Academy

Believe it! Blurb:

For most universities around the world illegal meteor-mining, politically explosive space colonies and wars waged between teenagers in robot battle suits are treated as the stuff of pure fantasy.

For Japan, they are the stuff of high academia.

In an attempt to inject “the most inventive possible thinking” into Japan, representatives of many of its most august universities are to become a “virtual faculty” of the Gundam Academy — the first academic institution based on a cartoon.

Next year dozens of engineers, astrophysicists, doctors, anthropologists, linguists — even town planners — will begin discussing how to convert the science-fiction series Gundam, created by Yoshiyuki Tomino, 66, into reality.