After losing to Angelique Kerber in the Australian Open a couple of years ago, tennis star Serena Williams said, “As much as I would like to be a robot, I am not. I try to. But, you know, I do the best that I can.”
The implication is that if Williams were a robot, she would be a perfect, match-winning machine. A consequence of being human is our inherent fallibility. How many Western narratives are built on this very premise of robotic perfection and efficiency? The Terminator can, well, “terminate” with such precision because the T-800 is a cyborg from the future. Marvel’s Ultron is a superpowered threat because of the cutting-edge technology that goes into creating the villain. Ava’s advanced programming in Ex Machina makes us recognize that, of course, the A.I.’s cunning can outwit a human. And let’s not even talk about the menacing efficiency of the security robots in Chopping Mall! Point is: if we’re looking for reference material to support the thesis that “technology is scary,” there’s plenty at our fingertips.
But there’s also a lot that goes the other way, both in fiction and movies. Robots don’t have to be exacting killers. Technology has the power to revive loved ones or to create a loyal friend. Cybernetics can enhance and preserve humanity without ultimately destroying it. There are plenty of stories like this, and some of the best originate from Japanese media. Manga and anime have, for years, shown us the brighter side of technology. Indeed, humans still do wrong, and plenty use technology to serve their nefarious means, but for many protagonists, robotic creations operate as colleagues, or, in some cases, friends and family—wellsprings of love and happiness.
Think about Dr. Tenma in Mighty Atom (aka Astro Boy) creating Astro, a robotic version of his lost son. After a period of rejection (a period depicted differently across various reboots and remakes), Tenma recognizes that Astro’s superhumanity is an asset, and that robots are not necessarily without emotion. A bond forms, and Astro becomes a force for good in the world. This symbiosis, in which human and machine help and depend on one another, is hardly unique to Mighty Atom. Examples of this kind of positive relationship exist in many iconic anime and live-action Japanese media, including Macross, Gundam, the Super Sentai series, and Neon Genesis Evangelion, to name only a few. In the U.S., as these shows were redubbed and reformatted into hits like Robotech and Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, our roboculture experienced its own Japanification, in which the near-perfect robot was not a machine of terror, but a respected companion.
So, why does so much modern Japanese media feature the trope of the beneficial robot? The answer to that question lies centuries in the past, starting with one instance of cultural blending, followed by intense isolation. For more, it is most helpful to turn to Timothy N. Hornyak’s book Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots. In this work, Hornyak traces the history of Japanese robots back to their protoculture, demonstrating that positive interplay between human and automata is woven into the tapestry of Japan’s history.
The Japanese Edo Period lasted from 1603 to 1868. During this time, the country was primarily isolationist and enjoyed economic prosperity, a booming arts industry, and relative peace. All of this can be seen as a reaction to ever-encroaching European Christianity, which, due to the open trade policies of previous years, was spreading to a hegemonic level in Japanese port areas where interaction with the West and China took place.
During this period of pre-Edo trade, however, Spanish Jesuits brought European technology into Japan. As Hornyak explains, “The Spanish Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier is believed to have introduced the first Western clock when he presented it to a feudal lord in 1551.” Throughout the remainder of the 16th Century, other Christian missionaries established a school called the Seminario in Nagasaki that taught clockmaking, organ building, and offered instruction on astronomical tools. With trade flowing in both directions, other Japanese businesspeople imported European timepieces and dissected them in order to produce Japan’s own mechanical clocks, the first of which was created in 1605. Prior to this, Japanese clocks, called wadokei, were radically different from Western ones. Wadokei were beautiful, often large machines that could be made intricate enough to feature chimes, calendars, and rotating dials. Time-telling precision took a back seat to expensive and elegant art designed mostly for the wealthy.
Thus, the Edo Period found the Japanese wadokei maker, already well-trained in crafting artful, complex, mechanical objects, growing ever more familiar with the standardized gears and cogs of deconstructed Spanish clocks. The match couldn’t have been more perfect. Japanese craftspeople worked to combine the two forms into new creations, eventually creating complex dolls that used clockwork elements to perform simple tasks automatically. These dolls became known as karakuri, or “mechanisms” (alternatively translated as “tricks”), and embodied the earliest form of Japanese robots. Prefiguring the assistive technology provided by manga mech suits and anime roboprotectors, karakuri were made to demonstrate servile motions like pouring tea or entertainment like shooting arrows and writing Chinese characters. All of the machinery that made these automata work was hidden under ornate robes made exclusively for each doll, preserving an air of mystery around each karakuri for all who observed them.
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Edo society was enthralled, with haiku poet Kobayashi Issa even writing a verse about the dolls: “Such coolness by the gate/as the tea-serving doll/brings another cup.” In this poem, Issa provides us with words of juxtaposing temperatures. The “coolness” and the “gate” evoke cold metal, certainly a feature of karakuri themselves. Yet, the doll is serving tea, a beverage traditionally poured hot. Issa, then, offers us a poem in which warmth can come from coldness—an idea not so different from Dr. Tenma’s eventual perspective on Astro, a cold (or, inorganic) robot capable of warm emotion. Even the name “Issa,” a name the poet adopted, translates to “a cup of tea,” allowing one to read the doll as serving not just a beverage, but the writer himself, an astute metaphor for the human emerging from the inhuman. Either way, there is no malice in this poem, only cooperation between the organic and inorganic.
Europe and, eventually, the U.S. both created their own automata, of course. In Europe, they emerged as lifelike machines that were very technically advanced. However, Dean of the Toyota National College of Technology Yoshikazu Suematsu sees a crucial difference. Hornyak paraphrases Suematsu as saying European automata were “attempts to reproduce human activities in machine form. The goal of Japanese karakuri was not realism but charm—art for its own sake…” Essentially, the European automata was much closer to what Serena Williams meant when she proclaimed that she is not a robot. A robot, in that context, would be a machine whose sole duty would be to exist as a facsimile of a perfect tennis player. The karakuri are more independent, not tied to realistic duplication but to the performance of their own “personality.” It doesn’t matter if the karakuri shoots an arrow well; it only matters if it does it in a way that informs an audience of its “self.” In this way, they echo the imprecise-but-beautiful craft of wadokei. Perhaps the true seed of more positive attitudes toward robots is here, in the appreciation of the automata as autonomous characters still reliant on human “friends” to make them run. This is Tenma’s arc in Astro Boy. This is Shinji’s trust in his Evangelion in Neon Genesis Evangelion. This is Hikaru Ichijyo and his VF-1 Valkyrie in Super Dimension Fortress Macross.
Perhaps over time U.S. interest in Japanese media will result in the spread and development of similarly positive attitudes toward technology. There are already plenty of foundational texts on which to build—after all, the children who grew up loving their Transformers toys (which were really Japanese Diaclones, Micromans, et al., all along) now comprise a chunk of today’s creators. In the recent Transformers spin-off movie Bumblebee, Charlie Watson (Hailee Steinfeld) turns to the titular Cybertronian and delivers a line seemly emblematic of Dr. Tenma and Astro, of the karakuri maker and their creation, and, perhaps, of the attitudes of many toward the technology that they nurture so that it helps and nurtures them in turn: “You’ve got me. And I’m not going anywhere.” Of course, Watson is as impermanent as any other human being, but, through her relationship with the robotic, she achieves a bond that may transcend mortality.
It is this attitude, in any text, TV show, or movie—and even in huge, Michael Bay-produced CGI extravaganzas—that many find heartwarming, and it is exactly this sentiment of appreciation and reciprocity toward robots and automata that underlies and informs centuries of Japanese culture and history.
Jonathan Alexandratos is a New York City-based playwright and essayist who writes about action figures and grief. Find them on Twitter @jalexan.
Damn. This was a great read.
The article suggests that the West has only hostile-robot stories and friendly-robot stories come mainly from Japan. The reality is far more complicated.
As far back as 1940 (Yes! 1940!) Isaac Asimov was noticing that stories about robots (stories by Western, mainly American authors) fell into what he called either Robot-as-Pathos or Robot-as-Menace, and deciding to carve out a new route by writing stories about robots that were machines, produced and maintained by engineers. So you have stories like “Runaround” and “Risk”, as well as ones using robots to look at humanity – “The Bicentennial Man” and so on.
The key difference, which the article does not address, is not friendly vs hostile – it is aspiration vs contentment.
Robots in Western stories want to be human.
Friendly robots want to join humans and be accepted on equal terms – Andrew the Bicentennial Man, Lt-Cdr Data from Star Trek, David from AI and so on, even the friendly T-800 in Terminator 2. Hostile robots want to usurp us – Skynet, Proteus, Rossum’s Universal Robots and so on. They have aspirations; they want more than they have.
Japanese robots are eerily content to remain robots, the dependable appendage of their human friends/owners.
Why that should be is a much more interesting question…
It’d also be interesting to fit Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity into this analysis.
I note that Asimov did write a few stories about robots who are content to be robots. There’s one that’s a dialogue involving a surgeon, who’s about to perform an operation on a human who wants a machine replacement heart rather than an organic one. The surgeon bemoans that the lines between human and robot are becoming blurred; more and more people have machine implants, more and more robots want organic tissue. He disapproves; human should stay human, and robots should be content – indeed proud – to be robots.
The last line reveals that the surgeon himself is a robot. The story’s called “Segregationist” , written in 1967. Interesting title; interesting timing.
Interesting learning about the karakuri, but as ajay says, Western robot stories are not exclusively antagonistic.
@2 and @5: Totally agree that this is not as simple as West-makes-antagonist-robots-Japan-makes-protagonist-robots. My goal was simply to suggest that Japan has a bunch of protagonistic robostories that surely do have counterparts elsewhere in the world, including the U.S., hence the line, “There are plenty of stories like this, and some of the best originate from Japanese media.” It’s more an attempt to say that I find the Japanese robo-protagonists interesting because they seem to be in conversation with this centuries-old history that the U.S. doesn’t have (it has it’s own, but it’s different, and, just by virtue of the creation of the country, more recent). I also appreciate citing Asimov. I would *love* to read a comparative piece that considers both Western and Japanese prose (and even including manga) sci-fi through this lens. Heck, I’d love it if someone could rope in sci-fi from other regions, too. I don’t have the knowledge to do that, but I think it would be fascinating. But the “But what about ___________?” statements you raise are important, and I hope more of those will allow us to flesh out some sort of global portrait of robot tales (as big and complicated as that would be).
Another factor to consider is Japan’s Shintoist philosophy, in which both animate and inanimate objects can possess spirits, and a created object deserves respect because it embodies the essence of the hard work its creator put into it, even a piece of its creator’s soul. So inanimate objects aren’t seen as lifeless things; they can have a value and spirituality comparable to that of a living being. This is why you often see manga, anime, and tokusatsu productions in which robots or computer programs are sentient or have mystical attributes, and where the line is blurred between science fiction and fantasy. (You mentioned Power Rangers. In the Japanese show that the first season of Power Rangers was adapted from, Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger, the Rangers’ giant robot animals were literal gods.)
@7 – Love that!
Another element to be considered is the divide between the “super-robot” and “real-robot” subgenres of mecha.
“Super-Robot” stories date from the 1950s (i.e., before most readers/writers knew anything about robotics), and treat the “robot” as basically a magical being that can be controlled by the operator, typically even powered by the pilot’s courage/manliness/determination/hot-bloodedness/whatever. The robot is usually a mad scientist’s one-of-a-kind creation (sometimes even a literal god), used to fight clearly-biological monsters.
The “Real-Robot” genre launched in the late 70s (i.e., as Western influences were becoming more common –Yoshiyuki Tomino admitted to drawing inspiration from Star Wars when he made Mobile Suit Gundam) as a deliberate deconstruction of Super Robots. Real-Robot mecha are sophisticated pieces of technology that can be mass-produced, modified, and customized (and even the one-offs are explicitly justified as “overdesigned” prototypes or test-types), and, while they are often fetishized in-show as having their own spirits or wills, this is treated purely as an affectation of the pilots.
I waited for this image when I saw this post.
Western robots want to be human because in Western thought humans are at the top of the hierarchy, all other creatures are “lesser”. Animistic Japanese kami don’t have to be human to matter.
Anyone who thinks robots are infallible has never tried to build one. See https://what-if.xkcd.com/5/ for a funny discussion of this.
I think you can’t understand Japan’s approach to robots in popular media and in it’s shared subconsciousness without taking in account the countries’ particular issues with demographics and isolationism. Japan is a country that has been aging for a long time and is reaching the point of crisis. At the same time it’s a country famous for its isolationist attitude towards the rest of the world… and frankly, for its rather xenofobic attitudes towards foreigners. Homogeneity is commonly seen as a pilar of conflict avoidance for the Japanese society, something of utmost importance to a culture that values politeness and “respect” to a pathological degree. This has the side effect of promoting automatization in order to avoid having to deal with immigration. Compare what happens, for exmple, in the UK, where a huge chunk of healthcare proffessionals are immigrants, and Japan, where there are constant efforts to look for automatized ways to deal with patients. On a historic level of analysis, you also have to take into account the post-war experience of Japanese economic boom. In a country where a huge part of the young male population (the common “work force” of a patriachcal society) was dead, a big part of its economic resurgence came thaks to automatization. Young workers learned the value of machines first hand and initially there was probably much less of the classic “machines will take my job over” fear. Instead of replacing workers, machines enhanced them (there were not that many to beginn with), giving rise to the idea that you can see in the examples you cited in regards of human-robot dinamics. Maybe there’s even a thing in regards of the Japanese attitude towards past and future in post-war shared perceptions. I don’t have a base for this, but it would make sense that in a society where ultra-nationalism and adherence to traditional forms (particularly in regards to the notions of empire and militarism) lead to a brutally lost war, people would rather look to the future afterwards; and the future was technology, machines, the (quite fulfilled) promise of development (simmilar as how the US post-war society cristalized its zeitgeist in the automobile).
I’m of course not saying that these are the sole explanations, but I think they are important factors to take in account.
Also, you cite mainly rather “old” pieces of media. It would be interesting what you read in other texts from Japenese popular culture. Jikan no Eve, for example, explores the human-robot integration in a way I seldomly have seen; not trough conflict and convoluted or epic narrative devices, but through small scale and more everyday issues (it reminds me more of Bradbury than of Hollywood). Naoki Urasawa’s take on the Tetsuwan Atom universe in “Pluto” is also a brilliant text on human-robot relations. Even in media where cyborgs are the focus instead of robots, like in Ghost in the Shell Stand Allone Complex, you can find the brilliant Tachikoma shorts where the robot-tanks have surprisingly deep conversations about their own nature and their relations to their human (and cyborg) team.
By the way… it’s fun how I’m asked to certify I’m not a robot to post this hahahhaa.
@3. I was genuinely saddened at the loss of Opportunity. Fifteen years, that’s the lifespan of a dog or cat that’s had a good run. I’m grateful about the vast knowledge that Spirit and Opportunity provided, and it was tough reading about Opportunity’s final, fatal struggle with the dust storm.
Western robots want to be human because in Western thought humans are at the top of the hierarchy, all other creatures are “lesser”. Animistic Japanese kami don’t have to be human to matter.
Counterpoint: Western robots want to be human because recent Western history is a succession of struggles for equality by groups historically considered inferior or even non-human. “Am I Not A Man And A Brother?” – or indeed “And Ain’t I A Woman?” These struggles succeeded (largely if not entirely) and we now consider this to be a good thing, so we tell stories about it.
Japanese history is different. As Andres implies, it may be rather comforting for them to have stories about a society where there are Japanese people in charge and non-Japanese things in reassuringly subservient positions, loyally working for their masters without a rebellious subroutine in their heads. There will never be protest marches by comfort robots.
@14/ajay: You make a good point about Western robot stories being allegories for civil rights, but I think you’re completely off-base about the rest. The whole point of this discussion is that robot characters in manga/anime are not treated as mindless subordinates, that it’s taken for granted that they can have minds and souls of their own and be loved as family members — even, in some cases, that divinity can emerge from them. I mentioned the kidvid example of Zyuranger‘s giant robots being literal gods, but there’s also the more adult, sophisticated anime Serial Experiments Lain, which was partly about whether something akin to God might have been created or tapped into by the power and complexity of our computer networks.
I didn’t say they were “treated as mindless subordinates”, but they’re treated, in the main, as loyal subordinates who are happy with their lot in life. What they aren’t treated as is equals – and they don’t mind that at all.
@16/ajay: I don’t think I agree with that characterization. As I said, there’s a fair amount of anime/tokusatsu where robots and AIs are literally divine. Then there’s something like Ghost in the Shell, where the line between human and AI is blurred to nonexistence and it’s the merger of the two that creates new emergent forces in society that transcend any individual.
And sometimes the subordinate role of the AI is questioned and portrayed negatively. One of my favorite kids’ animes is Digimon Tamers, from the same writer as the aforementioned Serial Experiments Lain, and touching on similar ideas in a younger-skewing way. Even though it’s based on a fighting game, the lead characters question and challenge the exploitation of the Digimon (computer game characters that gained sentience in the Internet and can take on physical form in the real world) as fighting animals, because they love them as companions and friends and don’t want to see them hurt. The main story arc of the climactic episodes is driven by one of the Tamers’ soul-crushing grief at the death of her Digimon, and the ultimate world-threatening monster that arises out of the digital world is basically an extended metaphor for her depression.
If anything, I think you’re wrong about the Japanese having a desire to see themselves as superior. A recurring theme in Japanese fantasy fiction is the danger of human arrogance in putting ourselves above nature. Japanese spirituality demands respect and deference toward the natural and the supernatural; the spirits that inhabit the world and its objects need to be shown proper respect and courtesy or they will turn on us. This theme shows up a lot in Miyazaki films like Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and even My Neighbor Totoro to an extent. It also figures in some Godzilla and Gamera movies — there’s a recurring theme of kaiju being a painful reminder that humans are not the dominant form of life, that we are merely guests on the Earth for a time and nature will punish us if we abuse its hospitality by exploiting or damaging it. Kaiju have a spiritual element that Westerners often miss — many of them, primarily Mothra, are treated as literal gods, or as embodiments of the spirit of destruction or the spirit of nature fighting back against human destruction. And as I said, Japanese beliefs don’t make a distinction between the spiritual nature of animate and inanimate objects, so robots and AIs can have the same spiritual and allegorical meaning as kaiju.
I think you’re judging Japan based on the behavior of Imperial Japan in the first half of the 20th century. But keep in mind that Imperial Japan lost, and caused immense destruction and loss of life to the Japanese people themselves. So their imperialism has been repudiated by later generations, seen as a fatal act of hubris that needs to be atoned for with humility. It’s true that there are other forces in Japanese society that are more nationalistic and prideful, but those two points of view both exist in competition with each other. It’s always simplistic and stereotyped to say “That entire culture believes this,” because every culture is going to have conflicting beliefs vying with each other internally, just as America or Britain has progressives and conservatives.
So naturally different works of Japanese fiction are going to convey different political and philosophical views, and it’s lazy to make blanket assertions about what they all have in common. Even a single fictional franchise can have totally opposite political views expressed within it — for instance, 1991’s Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah is a disturbingly jingoistic film that glorifies Imperial Japan’s past, painting Godzilla (to an extent) as Japan’s protector and the villains as time travelers seeking to undo the future where Japan rightfully becomes the dominant power on Earth; but 2001’s Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (known as GMK) is an anti-war allegory denouncing how the younger generation in Japan has forgotten the sins of its imperial past, in which Godzilla embodies the angry spirits of the WWII dead seeking to take revenge on Japan for its crimes, and the monsters battling him are spiritual protectors of the land who are just as ruthless toward humans who disrespect ancient shrines and holy sites.
Thanks to all for a thought-provoking article, and some thoughtful comments as well.
This made me want to see a karakuri in action so I went to YouTube and found this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5zYK9FxORI
It’s quite charming.
Thank you for the fascinating article.