こんにちは！ Hello! A special welcome to the Japanese readers of this blog. I’m aware that some of my most recent website visitors have been in Japan. It is so easy to fall in love with Japan. 日本がだいすきです。I love Japan. I returned to Australia earlier this week and I already miss Japan very much. I have not been very good at blogging about my residency but...
Read MoreOn the way to Osaka
Tom Cho 曹勵善 on Twitter On the bullet train to Osaka. Tomorrow, I’m interviewing the roboticist Ishiguro Hiroshi. I’m excited about it! http://bit.ly/mtcn55...
Read MoreMonumental.
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 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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