Robot Museum, we hardly knew ye
Sad news for robot fans: operator Gyrowalk has announced it will close the Robot Museum in Nagoya at the end of the month due to lack of visitors. It was opened a year ago on the strength of the popularity of the robots at the 2005 Aichi Expo, held nearby.
The museum was busy every time I went there. But visitor numbers did not meet the annual 400,000 expected by the company. High overheads were probably a big factor - the place has lots of staff and is located in the expensive Sakae downtown area in Nagoya. It was an excellent museum, though, and had a large retail area, event space and exhibitions gallery featuring a colorful robot chronology wall, rare SF magazines and real robots.Gyrowalk also runs the RoboCafe robot store in Osaka, but that has shut its doors for the time being. Last I heard it was to reopen following renovations but the closure of the Robot Museum probably means that won't happen.
Gyrowalk's woes show how hard it is to transform robot dreams into profit-making reality. U.S. robot firms like iRobot have generally been more successful at marketing non-industrial robots (like Roomba) than the Japanese because they are so focused on practical applications instead of fantasy. Still, as the first of its kind in the world the museum was a great achievement and a fine tribute to an amazing technology. It's a pity that it went so soon.
Labels: gyrowalk, robocafe, robot, robot museum
posted by Tim at 9:29 AM
2 Comments:
I think the failure of this museum also reflects a Japanese tendency one sees in the art world too: to have many small museums honoring a certain area or a company rather than consolidate things into a smaller number of larger viable national museums. (This may also reflect less government support, fewer tax breaks etc..) A robot exhibit might make sense as a significant part of a science museum, but a stand-alone robot museum is just too much of a niche. Maybe as Japan's robot ambassador, you should broker a sale of the contents of the museum to the Smithsonian or the Science Museum in London!
That is vastly disappointing. I kinda get the impression though that there'll eventually be a rebirth of the Robot Museum in the future, about the time when robots are more commonplace in open society. People will be like, 'Since we have Actroid, Wakamaru, and the Tamanoi Vinegar Robot practically everywhere, where did they come from? What is their history?' Hence, the need for a Robot Museum.
It'll happen. Just give it a decade or so.
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