Hajime's Workshop

One Thursday a month, a dozen Japanese men meet up to drink tea, chat about karaoke, and build a lifesize version of an immense fighting robot from a popular anime series.

It’s pouring rain the day I meet roboticist Hajime Sakamoto at the Fuku train station. Osaka in the rain is all wet, gray pavement and clear plastic umbrellas as masses of people rush from the shelter of one train station to the next transfer. But on this Monday evening, the Fuku station on the Hanshin Namba line (30 minutes and three transfers from my dorm) is not crowded. I easily spot Sakamoto waiting for me.

Small and slight, he wears jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt printed with cherry blossoms. A baseball cap covers his shaved head. “Hajimemashite,” I say, a formal “how do you do” that literally translates to “It is the first time meeting you.” He responds in kind, and leads me out to the street where two other men, Miki and Tsubouchi, wait with the car. Miki is gregarious and speaks very good English. Tsubouchi says little and wears a nicely tailored black suit, and introduces himself as the team’s web designer. The workshop is about a five minute drive away. After a month of exchanging clipped, polite emails, I am here to sit in on a monthly meeting, scheduled to begin an hour.

I first learned about Sakamoto’s robot from Reno Tibke, a writer for Akihabara News in Tokyo who has covered the robotics scene in Japan for a number of years. Sakamoto’s company earned just a short note on a list Tibke compiled of Japan’s most notable robotics projects: ”Hajime Robot: I know very little about this other than it’s insane and awesome.”

Sakamoto’s website provided a little more background. Sakamoto’s company, Hajime Robot, makes humanoid robots used by researchers and universities. Hajime Robot also created a robot that competed in the Nippon Television Network’s “Real Robot Battle” TV special, coming away with a big victory and an impressive gold wrestling belt (before I leave, they make me take a picture wearing the belt).

But a newer project has generated the most media attention: a four-meter-tall humanoid robot, modeled after the long running Gundam anime series about fighting robots. Just like the bots in the show, a human in the cockpit pilots the robot. Sakamoto says that he became interested in robots after watching the Gundam series in high school. In Japan, Gundam is a hugely popular cultural phenomenon. The first Gundam series, started in the late 70’s, pioneered the Mecha genre of anime, a style categorized by giant fighting robot suits. Since its creation, the Gundam franchise has expanded to include more than a dozen TV series, video games, and a vast array of merchandise. My roommate, a sarcastic redhead from Alliance, Ohio, seems to spend most of her savings on model Gundams kits with hundreds of tiny parts that take weeks to piece together. Sakamoto has been working toward a life-size Gundam for years. In 2007, he developed a one-meter robot, and in 2009, the team created a two-meter robot, the tallest humanoid robot in the world at the time.

I don’t have to wait long to see Sakamoto’s latest creation. The meeting won’t officially convene until 7:30pm, so after answering a few basic questions, we duck out into the rain and Sakamoto and a few men who have arrived take me to the workshop next door.

The robot is impressive in videos, but in person the machine’s sheer scale is still striking. Two square legs thicker than a grown man, lead up to a wire frame body, with a cockpit big enough for a human to sit comfortably. For now the arms are short stubs (the engineers tell me they would like it to be able to hold a beer). Though they won’t turn the robot on tonight (it takes too much time and preparation) we crowd around a laptop to watch videos of Sakamoto piloting the robot from the cockpit about two years ago ago. “It looks almost the same,” one man jokes, and the rest laugh. The mood is light, but he’s right to not noting the robot in the workshop looks terribly similar to the robot in the video.

Funding has been difficult. At one point there a robot restaurant in Tokyo expressed interest. The team also mention a theme park as a possible buyer. One man jokes that maybe I should ask my father for the robot as a present. The price is steep: 20 million yen, equal to about $170,000 dollars.

By the time we return to the meeting room, a few more men have arrived. The rain put a dent in attendance, Miki explains. We each get a small glass of green tea. A glass bowl with rice crackers sits in the center of the table. A few wear gray workman-like coveralls; others, khakis and button downs. Several others wear black suits, the ubiquitous uniform of the Japanese salaryman. A couple of the men give me their business cards. I try to accept politely in the Japanese fashion, with two hands.

Most of the meeting, conducted entirely in Japanese, escapes me. From what I can tell, money and possible sponsors are discussed, as are the next stage of the building process. Sakamoto passes around a metal finger joint, which one member jokingly uses to pick up his tea. Miki pushes one rice cracker my way, then another. Sakamoto is soft-spoken and rarely dominates the conversation. But when he speaks, everyone quiets down and listens.

A large portion of the evening is dedicated to interviewing one of the members of the group, an older man named Kanemoto, for the group’s website (they features an interview with a different team member every month). I only get the general gist: karaoke, family, drinking. The gathering features a strong social component. All of the men are volunteers, coming once a month after their day jobs to the small workshop to drink tea and talk about the project.

Toward the end they ask how much I’ve understood. “Amari,” I answer honestly. Not much. The day of the meeting meeting is two days before I am due to get on a plane back to Philadelphia. At the outset of the meeting, I mentioned that I had not decided what to do with my final day in Osaka. Miki-san asks the group for suggestions. “Final mission,” one member says in English, mock gravely. After a lively conversation of which I understand very little, they ask if I’ve been to Tenjinbashi-suji, the longest covered shopping street in Japan. I say I have. The same goes for the the aquarium and Osaka Castle. But finally, the members agree on a famous shrine in Osaka that somehow I’ve missed so far. “Nihon poi,” a thin, intense man in a gray worksuit says. A Japanese school friend later translates for the phrase for me, pointing out the window from where we are eating to a carefully curated miniature garden. “Very Japanese,” he tells me. “Japan-ish.”