alt.hn

8/13/2026 at 4:32:15 PM

Gakutensoku

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gakutensoku

by benbreen

8/17/2026 at 11:43:19 AM

I'm Japanese, and this is the first I've heard of Gakutensoku. If you asked people in Japan for an old Japanese "robot", I think most would come up with this tea-carrying karakuri doll. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakuri_puppet

That one predates the word "robot" entirely. The design is documented in a 1796 book called "Karakuri Zui", so Edo period, shoguns still in charge.

by h_mirin

8/17/2026 at 12:02:51 PM

Yeah, I was about to object that this is essentially a large automaton of which there are tons of earlier examples from Japan.

by ginko

8/17/2026 at 1:28:20 PM

Picture of the rebuilt robot: https://www.nippon.com/en/views/b00906/

by mrbluecoat

8/17/2026 at 8:52:45 AM

The Wikipedia page doesn't say: what happened to this robot?

> the details of its disappearance are unknown

A mystery! Someone will know...

by vintagedave

8/17/2026 at 9:09:40 AM

I can find references to:

* Appearance in Korea at an expo (1928, 1929?): https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/landing/article.kci?arti_id=...

* The creator writing about it in 1931 (reference 10 on the same page)

Shanghai but uncertain date.

Was it dismantled in either Korea or China, or shipped back and dismantled, or destroyed?

by vintagedave

8/17/2026 at 12:48:15 PM

"the 7'8" tall automaton would start his performance by touching a mace to his head before he proceeded to write out Chinese characters...

"touring Germany when he was somehow lost...

"In 2008, the Osaka Science Museum produced a new Gakutensoku. At 10'6", the new golden-skinned automata...

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/gakutensoku

--- More on Nishimura & motives: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-short-strange-life-of-the-firs...

by 8bitsrule

8/17/2026 at 9:08:13 AM

I like to think he's in some wealthy parlor somewhere, sequestered away, bringing mirth and humanity to an elite few who need it most of all.

by aa-jv

8/17/2026 at 11:37:56 AM

[dead]

by ludamn

8/17/2026 at 1:49:01 PM

I have zero knowledge of Japanese but in the description's first line it is 學天則, but in the picture the text is 則天學.

by miki_mq

8/17/2026 at 2:01:11 PM

When Japanese is written horizontally, it can be read either left->right or right->left. (occasionally, quite bewildering)

I have only seen right->left on signs; I have never seen it in books or magazines.

by jankcorn

8/17/2026 at 2:39:09 PM

It's technically not right-to-left. It's columnar top-to-bottom (縦書き), with the columns right-to-left.

In signage you can have one character per column (kind of like one word per row on some English signs), making it look like right-to-left text.

by wren6991

8/18/2026 at 2:32:22 PM

Korea does this, also. Sometimes I'll get confused at a restaurant or other sign that is just 2x2 array of syllables. Is this horizontal or vertical? Even more confusing is when it can be sensibly read either way.

by seoulbigchris

8/17/2026 at 3:36:23 PM

I've mostly seen it on the right side of vehicle livery.

by CarVac

8/17/2026 at 11:42:40 AM

Automaton

by tantalor