I’ll do another blog post from Japan soon but, in the interim, here: have some photos of a giant robot Buddha. This is from the Ushiku Daibutsu in the Ibaraki prefecture. It’s the biggest statue of Buddha in the world (120 metres from top to bottom, including the base) and it’s three times the size of the Statue of Liberty. Monumentalism...
Read MoreThe Sound of “The Sound of Music”
The title “The Sound of Music” might refer to various texts. For me, it refers to a stage musical, a film musical, a sing-a-long screening of the film musical (which I’ve been to twice, ahem), a tour in Saltzberg that I have always wanted to go on, a well-worn video cassette of the film musical that I used to watch on regular visits to my...
Read MoreTetsujin 28-Go in Kobe
In 2009, some Kobe locals raised money for, like, the best project ever: to create a full-scale statue of Tetsujin 28-Go (known to westerners as Gigantor). The statue was erected in a park in the Nagata Ward (not far from Shin-Nagata train station), apparently to encourage people affected by the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. Mitsuteru Yokoyama, the...
Read MoreRaised by video games
My partner once remarked that I was raised by video games. That’s an exaggeration but, well, not by too much. I was the child of divorced parents. As a kid, I – along with my brothers – saw my dad every fortnight. At the time, my dad lived in the city. On those weekends of visiting dad, he used to take me and my brothers to video game...
Read MoreJoyful condoms
Coming to life
Let’s start this blog post with one of Toyota’s Partner Robots. This robot staged a neat trumpet-playing performance at the Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology, which is in Nagoya. A trumpet-playing robot with wide eyes and a jaunty little feather can endear itself to a crowd. As this robot played “Moon River” and...
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