Robocandy

This, gentle reader, is robot omiyage.

Omiyage are souvenirs, a de rigueur gift for colleagues if you're a salaryman on a business trip. They're usually chocolates and the like.

Never little robot buns...until now.

Thanks to the new Robot Museum in Nagoya, which I finally visited. The organizers really did their homework and have put together a very impressive multimedia chronology of famous anthropomorphic machines fictional and real, from Hadaly of Tomorrow's Eve to Honda's Asimo and beyond. A highlight of the gallery is the actual Wabot 1, the first full-sale humanoid robot, developed in 1973 by Prof. Ichiro Kato of Waseda University.

The place is more than a museum. There's also an event space that accommodates visiting robots, as well as a large "robot department store" on the ground floor. Everything robotic, from toys and robot kits to t-shirts and candies, is on offer. Thousands of customers throng the aisles on weekends; a good chunk of them are gaijin.

The manju bun above is part of a slew of Robot Museum merchandise for sale. Comes in this here package.

The taste? Milky-sweet, with a touch of silicon.