I haven ' t watched a gundam series since Toonami played Gundam wing ~ 15 years ago , but I ' m am avid gunpla builder . You may run into some elitist people at meet ups , but tgis community is really good about accepting everyone . <| sep |> I ' m not saying it was paradise . I would guess that many of those who left in the early days were former members of the bourgeois class for whom the idea of a working class standard of living appeared to be a fate worse than death . You can imagine how wealthy Americans might react if they were told that they would live in the projects or trailer parks or other working class housing . Most of them feel entitled to live better than everyone else by virtue of their upbringing . Another aspect of it was simply that the West won the propaganda war . We have a way of projecting our way of life as being far rosier than it actually is to the outside world . Our media presence either obscures our social problems or romanticizes them . We still see this today . Some of this may be speculation . I only know the Germans who stayed .