This fascinating book charts toy robot design of the last half of the 20th century and explores Japanese aesthetics in tinplate toys, especially robots. Over 200 photographs and original conceptual drawings illustrate this captivating history, from the wind-up walking mechanism of the "Diamond Planet Robot" to the sophisticated "Answer Game Machine," the first robot computer capable of doing mathematical problems. Tomy, Horikawa, Waco, and Sony are just a few of the manufacturers whose robotic designs are featured here. The captions provide much relevant information, including date, size, manufacturer, and current values. This important book is of compelling interest to historians, collectors, designers, and students of Japanese studies and popular culture in the golden age of toy production.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Awful typesetting makes this nearly unreadable,
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This review is from: Toy Robots from Japan: Techno Fantasies (Schiffer Book for Collectors) (Hardcover)
This book achieves the very real distinction of being literally hard to read, as the type is laid out on the page in a zig zag fashion. In essence, each line is either a few characters to the right or the left of the line above it, which really makes it painful to try to follow the text. I was also disappointed that this book left out a wide variety of japanese robot toys like the fist firing die cast robots of the 70s, or the big plastic jumbo machinders (appeared in the US as the large format Shogun Warriors). The writing style tends towards heavy generalization too, especially in regards to what Japanese culture is about, and really leaves out a huge piece of the cultural tradition of automata in Japanese history.
If you are interested in the topic, I highly recommend "Loving the Machine" by Timothy Hornyak. Hornyak's book paints a much fuller historical picture, going through the Karakuri tradition, and covers a wide breadth of robots both in real and imaginary.
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