Bank on it

From an HSBC ad at Narita Airport outside Tokyo. It was the last thing I saw in Japan before a recent trip stateside where I spoke at the National Academy of Science along with astronaut Mamoru Mori and robot creator Tomotaka Takahashi. HSBC, which calls itself "the world's local bank," clearly knows the Japanese market - many baby boomers would be struck by a natsukashii (nostalgic) feeling when seeing tin toys from the fifties and sixties like this one.

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.