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Historical Record
Shinji Ikari is born on 6 June 2001, in the uneasy year that follows Second Impact. That date matters because it places him exactly where the series needs him historically: young enough to belong wholly to the damaged post impact generation, but old enough to stand at the center of the military and psychological crisis that unfolds in 2015. He is not a survivor of the old world. He is a child of the altered one. The coastlines, heat, political secrecy, and atmosphere of collective unease that define modern Evangelion are already in place around him before he can understand any of them.
His parentage makes the event more than a family milestone. Shinji is the son of Gendo Ikari and Yui Ikari, two figures already tied to the scientific and institutional currents that will dominate the next decade. Yui's work connects her to the Evangelion project. Gendo's ambitions place him on the path toward the command structures that later govern NERV. Shinji's birth therefore occurs at the meeting point of domestic life and hidden state power. On paper, he enters the world as an ordinary child in an ordinary family. In practice, he is born into one of the most consequential households in the history of the post impact era.
What gives this date its lasting weight is what it fixes in motion. By the time Shinji is three years old, he witnesses the contact experiment in which his mother is lost inside Unit 01. Soon after, his father sends him away. Those later events do not change the meaning of his birth, but they do change the conditions under which that life unfolds. A child born in a period of national reconstruction becomes a child marked by private abandonment as well. That combination is central to his historical role. Shinji grows up at a distance from the institution that nevertheless prepares to call on him when the Angels arrive.
Seen from the wider perspective of Evangelion history, Shinji's birth is the quiet beginning of one of the age's decisive biographies. The date itself contains no spectacle. No alarms sound. No city retracts underground. Yet the later defence of Tokyo 3, the operation of Unit 01, and the emotional center of the series all depend on this simple fact: on 6 June 2001, one year after the planet is thrown into crisis, a boy is born who will later be asked to bear a burden far beyond anything a recovering world has the right to demand from a fourteen year old. In historical terms, his birth marks the arrival of a human life that the age will try to turn into an instrument, even as that same life remains painfully, unmistakably personal.
Key details
Date: 6 June 2001
Location: Japan
Source: Neon Genesis Evangelion, 1995 to 1996, and the Red Cross Book, 1997
Significance: Shinji's birth introduces the future pilot of Unit 01 and links the Ikari family directly to the post impact history of Evangelion.
Related events
FAQ
Q: Is Shinji born before or after Second Impact?
After. He is born in 2001, which is one year after the catastrophe of 13 September 2000. That is why he belongs entirely to the post impact generation.
Q: Why does the date 6 June 2001 fit the series timeline so well?
Because the main series begins in 2015, when Shinji is fourteen. The date aligns cleanly with both his age and the broader chronology used across Evangelion background material.