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 MoreComing 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...
Read MoreHello Robo
Gambarimasho!
Yesterday, I arrived in Nagoya, Japan and my Asialink residency began. My residency motto is “Ganbarimasho!” (“Let’s do it!”) What I plan to do tonight is to learn some katakana. Ganbarimasho: it’s time to get my katakana on. So, tonight, I’ll turn my attention to writing and you can turn your attention to a...
Read MoreWhere do you get names for your characters from?
Fiction writers: where do you get names for your characters from? These days, I’m getting most of my character names from here.
Read MoreI, Robot Writer
I’ve been going through a “Let’s write about robots” phase. I really enjoy writing about robots. However, surely I’m not the only writer to fantasise about getting a robot to do my writing for...
Read More
