It's a mechanical kind of love

One of the most popular mysteries of 18th-century Europe was the Chess-playing Turk, a robot-like automaton that won all of its games, left its opponents baffled and occasioned much early talk of artificial intelligence, its pleasures and perils.

The mystery was solved with the discovery of a talented youth closely confined within the machine itself. Extracted from these narrow precincts he was execrated and dismissed, yet a further mystery remains. Why is it that robots inspire such contrary emotions: admiration, execration, love, hate.

That is the question faced in Timothy Hornyak's richly detailed, beautifully researched and highly interesting account of robotry in Japan, a country where it has long proliferated.

From its beginnings with the karakuri puppets (wound-up dolls that shot arrows, played flutes, served tea), robots progressed through Mighty Atom (aka Astro Boy) and Aibo (the machine mutt) to humanoid soccer-star VisiON Nexta and the startling clone-machine, a pretty, if limited, android dubbed Repliee Q1expo.

Though Europe had its early marvels (embroidered lady playing the harp for Marie Antoinette, the child Mozart still fingering his clavichord), it was Japan that forged ahead into robot-land. In so doing, it displayed a real kinship between the human and the machine, one quite different from that glimpsed in the West.

There one saw Karel Capek's potentially untrustworthy RUR robots, and such later menaces as the film versions of Frankenstein's creation (though made with strictly human parts), the lady-vamp android in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," "Robocop," the "Terminator," and the intelligent but perhaps malevolent machines in the recent film "I, Robot."

In the latter entertainment, actor Will Smith voiced a profound distrust, but this fell on deaf ears in Japan. The picture did not do that well and perhaps a reason was that, here, robots are cute and, by extension, good. (There is even a Hello Kitty robot.) The giant robots of manga and anime are crime avengers, not themselves criminals.

One local expert maintains that these machines have "souls," and a Honda official actually traveled to the Vatican to consult with the Holy See about a possible negative reaction to playing God and making robots. (The result was encouraging. "Since Honda had made the robot, it meant that God made the company do it."

Just as sugar is routinely added to iced coffee in Japan and bread is commonly sweetened, so other consumer products -- like robots -- are given large doses of kawaii, that "cute-factor" that sells so well locally. Consequently, Japanese robotry must create products not only humanoid, but also solicitous to a degree.

There is not only Aibo, the robot pet dog, but comforting mechanical baby seals, kindly housekeepers for the elderly -- no animated Dutch wives yet but they are perhaps on the way.

This attitude to robotry is sometimes criticized. Osamu Tezuka, one of the men responsible for it, is said to have displayed "a profound awareness of the weakness of man, and of the danger that man will misuse technology."

Indeed, one remembers the fate of an early robot, the egg-shaped Tamagotchi, a gadget that you could feed or starve at will -- one you could even convincingly kill. Over 20 million were sold in Japan, but I wonder how many are now "alive," since the majority fell into the hands of the young, that class often rendered otherwise frustratingly powerless.

Author Hornyak, more charitably addressing this difference of the Japanese attitude to robot gadgetry, says: "So, why are robots so loved in Japan? Simply because they are simultaneously science and fiction." That is, they are machines but human-like. Just like us because, by extension (9-to-5 jobs, slaving at the behest of others, computer for brains) we are all robots.