Customer Reviews

Toy Robots from Japan: Techno Fantasies (Schiffer Book for Collectors)

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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.