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Meet the Man Who Predicted Japan's Humanoid Robot Craze
Welcome back to MangoBot, a biweekly column about Asian futurism by TokyoMango blogger Lisa Katayama. In the spring of 1988, Japanese publisher Kodansha released a revealing English-language book titled Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics, and the Coming Robotopia. The book predicted a new era when humanoid robots would dominate Japanese society in the same way that industrial robots were then dominating behind-the-scenes manufacturing in the country. It was a topic that nobody in the Western world knew much about at all. The author, Frederik L. Schodt, was a freelance interpreter from Washington, DC who lived in Japan as a kid and traveled extensively between the Japan and the US—often as a private interpreter for Tezuka Osamu, the God of manga (Japanese comic books). And he predicted a social trend that was nearly beyond comprehension in the 1980s. More »
9:00 AM on Fri Apr 25 2008
By LISA KATAYAMA
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14 comments
Latest by Channing: @saketini99: Personally, my take on it was that flexiverse was touting the awesome of Japan therefore he was spouting "Nipponese." Nippon being the more nationalistic flavor of Nihon since they're both written the same way (日本). I really thought that more »
