When some engineers moved from making functional, industrial robots to humanoid robots that interacted with people, Japan’s particular history likely coloured how they were perceived. In 1649, the military rulers of Japan prohibited using technology to develop new weapons, to prevent the rise of new rivals, according to research by Cosima Wagner, a researcher at Freie Universität in Berlin. So artisans focused on more innocuous creations, such as mechanical dolls that performed in puppet theaters or served real tea in real teacups.

When Japan finally opened up to foreign contact over two centuries later, those skilled toy developers led the way in adapting Western technology for more practical uses. In 1875, for instance, the doll-maker Tanaka Hisashige started Tanaka Seisakusho (Tanaka Engineering Works), Japan’s first mechanical engineering company; 64 years later, after a major merger, it became known by the more familiar name Toshiba.

‘Uncanny valley’

Though proto-robots went out of fashion during Japan’s rapid 20th-Century modernisation, the idea of mechanical beings as amusements may have lingered in the national consciousness.

When Masahiro Mori, the researcher who coined the term “uncanny valley,” a noted robotics thinker, first started to do research on robots in the 1970s, he found it difficult to be taken seriously. The phrase, which refers to the discomfort we feel when confronted with human-like entities, seemed at odds with Japan’s relationship with robots.

“In those days, people didn't think universities should be doing research on robots,” he said in an interview with the magazine IEEE Spectrum. “They thought that it was frivolous to be working on a ‘toy’.” Japan had been forced to demilitarise during the American occupation, and the officially pacifist nation put little effort into using robots as weapons.