AltJapan: Super 1796 Robot

If you've got even the slightest love for Japanese toy robots -- and really, what person of quality and taste doesn't? -- hither thee to the Edo-Tokyo Museum, located near the sumo "stables" in the old-school Ryogoku area of Tokyo. That's right: it's time to meet the karakuris.

Karakuri are traditional Japanese automata, intricate clockwork figures that performed all sorts of tricks for audiences in the Edo and Meiji eras. The earliest designs date back to the 1600s, they're the direct ancestors of the robot toys and action figures that geeks know and love today, and... blah blah blah. Those with a hankering for more info can check out Fred Schodt's 1988 classic on the subject, Inside the Robot Kingdom.

I'd seen karakuri before, but this is one of those rare occasions that you get to seem them in action rather than stuck behind glass. Three times a day, you can sit in a theater and watch as a wisened old dude comes out to wind 'em up and let them do their thing on a tabletop. The most famous of the bunch is a replica of a kimono-wearing clockwork doll that serves guests cups of tea. The design of that baby dates back to at least 1796. Another doll, an artfully restored vintage piece, creepily paints perfect kanji-characters thanks to a complex series of gears and weights. It's one of only three in existence. Hailing from an era long before that of plastic or tin or Chogokin Z, all of them are chock full o' parts made from animals. A mini-sized version of the tea doll manages to hit an engangered-species trifecta: an ivory torso, a sea-tortoiseshell parts case, and a whale baleen spring. ("I'd be arrested if I tried to take this out of the country," laughed the curator as he wound it up.)

The karakakuri also seem to be the first examples of an unsettling trend: the Japanese tendency to chuck out anything considered pop-cultural out with the trash. The vast majority of the figures were simply tossed out when they broke or the owners tired of them, a fate doomed to be repeated with 19th century ukiyo-e woodblock prints, 1950s tin toys, and 1970's diecast robots. The concept of obsessively hoarding pop-culture ephermera seems to be a recent and near exclusively otaku-driven phenomenon. See? See!? In another couple hundred years, collectors of robot toys will hailed as cutting-edge preservationists of Japanese culture and art. (In the meantime, a couple hundred yen'll get us a cup of coffee at Starbucks-san.)

Mr. Tea-Carrying Doll

Calligraphic Doll

Tea doll in small and extra-small flavors

A tiny wind-up boat toy used by a Meiji-era daimyo to wow party guests