That brings back memories! You mention that you saw this on American cable TV, so are you an American resident? Let me say this as a guy who saw this in Japan back then.
The story is fiction, but it was produced by Gainax, so I felt that the characters were modeled after Anno Hideaki for Kubo and Okada Toshio for Tanaka. Or rather, and this is just my imagination, I think that things similar to that "fiction" were happening all over Japan in the 80s. It was a pre-internet world, and while machismo in Japan has been declining since the war, it was still on its way, and it was a time when college students who were no longer children were considered childish, stupid, and foolish to be into manga and anime. It's been almost 40 years since then. I host AirBnB at my parents' house in Japan, and the other day a man came to stay with me from Wales and had tattoos on his arms, but when I looked closely at the designs, I saw that they were covered in Shonen Jump manga (Naruto, One Piece) and Nintendo video games (Pokemon, Mario, Zelda). The fact that they chose to tattoo the "Master Sword in the Rock" from the Legend of Zelda, inspired by the famous legend, rather than Excalibur, which is supposed to be a Welsh story, reminds us of how far we have come. It also reminds us of a documentary I saw in an interlude of "Otaku no Video" called "A White Man Living in Japan Who Loves Japanese Anime Has a Lum Tattoo on His Arm." Of course, that documentary is a play, but I felt like I saw the "real version" of it last month.
So how is it now compared to the 80s, when liking anime and video games was a childish subculture? In "Otaku no Video," "otaku" was an ostracized minority, but now they are the majority. It makes me dizzy.
If introverted otaku became the majority, would the world in the 21st century become more peaceful, with fewer violent incidents caused by testosterone-rich men and wars between nations? I don't think so, but I feel that at least in terms of "neutralizing and feminizing men," Japan is ahead of America.
And in this anime, the Japanese view of China at that time is somewhat exaggerated. They said they were going to build a garage kit factory in China, but that was simply a reflection of their attitude of seeing China as a byword for "cheap and abundant labor." Furthermore, at that time, China was pushing ahead with its national policy of importing technology from Japan, and it was a time when economics took precedence over the political conflicts of World War II. Looking at the yen-dollar exchange rate at the end of this year, 2024, Japan's "cheap and abundant labor" should be able to make a comeback, but looking around, factories have disappeared from Japan, and American companies are not going to order work from Japan to Japanese people who still can't speak English. And more than 80% of my homestays are tourists from China, and although they didn't grow up with Japanese video game consoles from the 1980s, they grew up watching Japanese anime from the following decade onwards, and many of them can speak Japanese only through anime, even without Japanese language education at school. Speaking of "otaku" levels, Chinese tourists try to go to a cafe (just around the corner from my house) run by an actor who starred in the "Ultraman" TV series that Anno Hideaki loved. I ask them, "That's a Japanese TV series from the 70s, how do you know it?" and they reply, "I saw it all on the Internet." This is the true end of "otaku no video"
