Rocket punch!

More on the ongoing Great Robot Exhibition in Tokyo: it has lots of cool exhibits like anime super robot Mazinger Z, above. Check out my Wired News photo gallery - I also have an article in the Japan Times about it and the related show Asimo show.

Major robot show opens in Tokyo

Japan's National Museum of Nature and Science has just opened a big show entitled "The Great Robot Exhibition: Karakuri, Anime and the Latest Robots," running through Jan. 27 in Ueno Park, Tokyo.

I attended the press preview and was impressed. The organizers have gathered many of the best Japanese robots out there today, and have extensive displays on the background of robot development such as karakuri clockwork dolls and anime icons like Astro Boy.

If you're in town, "Dai Robotto Haku" is worth catching. It's a great retrospective on Japanese robot culture. Highlights include a wall of one hundred "Master Grade" Gundam plastic models, an original 19th-century karakuri archer doll by Tanaka Hisashige and a new stage show by Honda's Asimo, the premier humanoid robot.

If you can't make the exhibition, you might want to buy Loving the Machine instead!

Here be dragons

I was in the port of Yokosuka southwest of Tokyo recently and dropped by the new Yokosuka Museum of Art, where installation artist Kenji Yanobe's robotic artwork Giant Torayan is on display. Torayan is a fire-breathing sculpture that's the size of a small house.

See how small the museum attendant is in this photo. She's doing the Japanese "X" sign because you're not allowed to take pictures. The huge funnel-like object behind Torayan emits a deafening steamship blast in case you're not intimidated enough by the baby-faced bot. The spikes on the back of its head are a direct reference to comic icon Astro Boy.

Torayan can also move its head and arms a bit. As it says in the ad above, a pyrotechnics display will be held July 14 at the museum, which is about 35 minutes by bus from JR Yokosuka Station. The sculpture is part of a larger Yanobe installation that includes an army of little men wearing yellow Hazmat suits, some riding a ferris wheel. It's all very surreal.

There's a video of Torayan spewing flame and jamming with Tokyo synth band Mas here.

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.

This little piggy

Want to encourage your budding little industrialist? This nifty piggy bank, mentioned in an earlier post, teaches children the important virtues of thrift and factory automation. Let's see a mutual fund do that!

Not only does this bank have a coin receptacle guarded by a multi-jointed robot arm, it boasts AI functionality: it's a "decision maker." The user asks a question, pulls the lever and gets pithy responses like "never." Sounds a bit grim, but kids have to learn the hard facts of life when it comes to all those eternal questions. Like, when do I get my money back?

Never!