――How did you first get Yamashita involved in this project?
Tsurumaki: When the project was greenlit, I asked him, "If you have any ideas on what you want to do with Gundam or mobile suits, please feel free to pitch them." The first concept he submitted was his Zaku design, which we ultimately used pretty much as-is.
Yamashita: Yes. Around that time, I drafted the full-body Zaku design, then just the Gundam. That was the order, I believe.
――Could you share the overarching concept you had for the mecha in this series?
Yamashita: First, we wanted the Zaku to remain the standard, definitive mobile suit in that world. Second, we wanted to remove the usual "character" elements from the mobile suits. Whether it's a combat or a civilian model, a mobile suit in space is basically an extension of a vehicle, and that's where we started--thinking of them as advanced heavy machinery, rather than stylized "heroes."
――So you envisioned them as a direct evolution of construction or work vehicles?
Yamashita: Exactly. The moment you say Gundam, there's often a built-in expectation that the design will look heroic, you anthropomorphize it. One of the ways we departed from that was by giving the Zaku a smaller foot shape. If you think of it as an actual work machine, you’d want it to walk around efficiently, and a huge foot might be unwieldy. It's like wearing ski boots, everyone knows how awkward that can be.
――In your view, what must a design have to be considered “Gundam?”
Yamashita: When you get down to it, I think it’s that dual fin and those eyes.
Tsurumaki: One of the first design proposals Yamashita gave us had no visible eyes at all, it looked extremely cool, but it didn’t feel like “Gundam.”
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