I’m sure if you asked someone who wasn’t particularly well acquainted with anime what its defining features are, you’d hear the standard responses: big eyes, neon hair, sex, and giant robots. Of course, every anime fan knows that there’s much more to the medium than, say, sexy big-eyed giant robot pilots with neon hair.

A lot of sexy big-eyed giant robot pilots have perfectly normal black hair, for example.

But people wouldn’t say those things if they weren’t true to some extent. Anime characters do typically have big eyes. Unnatural hair colors are a common sight. Sex is still a driving force in the industry.

And giant robots have never gone out of style.

It’s no secret that I’m not the world’s biggest mecha anime fan. I don’t actively dislike the genre or anything; rather, I’ve just never been all that intrigued by it. At the same time, I’m not much of a shounen action fan, and seeing as a lot of mecha series are, in part, shounen action series, I’ve steered wide and clear of the genre over the years. It’s not my thing.

But, I think there’s more to it than just that. As a child growing up, I never developed the same fascination with machines that many young boys do. My older brother had a keen interest in airplanes, likely driven by the fact our father worked in the aircraft industry. I had greater interest in writing, music, and other creative pursuits. And when we played together, I’d take my Legos and construct cities and buildings; my brother would build automobiles and spaceships. As we grew older, his interest turned to cars and architecture. Mine, to weather and maps. Today, he works in industrial design. I work in international business.

Or, to be more exact, I work in international business in the aerospace industry, spending my days surrounded by engineers who probably grew up with similar interests as my brother. Except, they’re still building their spaceships today. And when they talk about it, their eyes light up, and I realize how much passion they have for machines and what makes them work. And I think that explains a lot about the enduring popularity of mecha anime. If you accept that most Japanese anime fans are male and likely grew up with similar interests as my brother and many of my coworkers, you start to understand the appeal of mecha anime.

Of course, things change. I’m not entirely sure how to explain the growing popularity of moe anime and bishoujo game adaptations in a similar fashion - I’m not sure I want to know, to be honest - and as anime has spread around the globe, the diversity of its fans has increased tenfold. Mecha has held on nonetheless, but the focus has gradually shifted from the machines to the lives of the people who pilot them and the conflicts of which they are tools.

Or perhaps it’s been that way for some time already. It is the Gundam model, after all, and even though there’s no shortage of Gundam freaks out there who can tell you the thread length on every screw holding a MS-06J Zaku II together, there are just as many who spend their weekends dressing up like Char Aznable and waxing philosophic about the virtue of war with their Zeon comrades at the corner coffee shop.

Oddly enough, however, the one mecha show I consider a favorite is one in which the mechanics of the mecha themselves are both realistic and presented in such a way that many engineers would appreciate. Of course, I’m talking about Patlabor. With the exception of its oversized service revolver and gratuitous design elements, the Ingram makes sense. And many of the common Labors featured in the show look and function like the construction implements they are. I suppose you could argue that there are more efficient ways of doing construction work than utilizing giant bipedal robots, but from a purely mechanical standpoint, Labors are pretty no-nonsense compared to the giant robots in your average mecha series.

The fact that Labors are, essentially, giant machines is not lost on the show, either. Special Vehicles has more gearheads than police officers. Even a few of the police officers are mecha otaku in their own right. And the show spends as much time dealing with stories of industrial espionage and the politics of an increasingly technocratic world as it does stories of routine police work. The tag line at the end of each episode says a lot about the show’s outlook, I think: “This is a work of fiction, but in ten years, who knows?” Gundam is science fiction for dreamers. Patlabor, however, is science fiction for realists.

Not that there’s anything wrong with dreaming, of course. Today’s dreams are tomorrow’s reality, and all that jazz. But, while I have a little bit of dreamer in me, I’ve always been a realist at heart. It’s just one of the many reasons I love Patlabor as much as I do.

And when people ask me what I do for a living, and I say, “I work with a bunch of rocket scientists, but I just pretend to be a lawyer all day,” it’s not like I’m trying to make them laugh.

Honest.