Droidus ubiquitans japonicus

Traveling in a remote region of Honshu Island, I met an old man who offered me a lift to the next village. We stopped for lunch along the road, and over some katsu-don he told me he made tiles for a living.

He invited me to his workplace, which I imagined to be a quaint workshop and kiln, since the sparsely populated region is known for ceramics. I agreed, and we drove up into the mountains as snow began to fall.

I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was. Turns out the man works in a roof tile factory -- which is full of robots! The place was quite out of the way on a mountain road. I snapped a few pics of some European robot arms stacking bundles of tiles onto pallets. Other robots were wrapping the stacks, or moving tiles along to and from the ovens.

So much for the quaint craftsman shop I had imagined. This made me realize, again, the fact that industrial robots are everywhere in Japan.

Gladhanding

Resin maker Daiwa Giken Industrial Co.'s ad, gracing Fukuyama Station on the Sanyō-honsen Line, says it all: "Dreams and high-tech through plastic."

Robot antiques roadshow

On the road in rural Japan recently, I spotted this guy amid some old teacups and lamps at a very curious antiques shop in Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture. Some of these older toy robots from the fifties and sixties can fetch tens of thousands of yen, or a lot more, in Japan.

The shop is called Sanyo-do and it's worth checking out if you're in Kurashiki, famed for its old warehouses along the canal. Not only does Sanyo-do inexplicably have dozens of porcelain HMV dogs on its roof (the terrier listening to the gramophone), its upper floor houses an amazing piggy bank museum -- which happens to include a piggy bank in the shape of a robot welding arm!

Perfect for budding little industrialists.