Meet Chihira Junco, a tourist greeter at a shopping mall in Tokyo. In her crisp blue button-down shirt, white blazer and pinstripe skirt, she stands in sensible pumps behind a counter in Aqua City Odaiba on Tokyo Bay, dispensing directions to local sites and shops in Japanese, Chinese and English.

She is not, however, human. Ms. Junco — if you can use an honorific for a machine — joins an incipient group of androids springing up around Japan. There are also Yumeko, a receptionist at the Hen-na Hotel, a robot-operated boutique in Nagasaki, and Matsukoloid, who appears in a popular television variety show with her human doppelgänger, Matsuko Deluxe.

Toshiba, the electronics company, developed Chihira Junco in collaboration with technology labs at several Japanese universities. She and four other androids cost ¥10 million (about $93,000) to produce, but only Ms. Junco — Chihira? — is currently out in public, while the others remain with their maker. The company said it planned to develop 1,000 more androids in 2017. By 2020, it hopes to make 10,000 a year.

At Aqua City, which is popular with tourists and where a small replica of the Statue of Liberty stands in a park near the mall entrance, visitors can tap on a screen to ask Chihira questions like “Where are you from?” (“I was born in Mizuho-machi, Nishitama-gun in Tokyo. I now live alone in the Minato ward”) and “What’s your favorite food?” (“I especially like watermelons and Japanese pears”).