Danger! Warning! Intruder Approaching! For recalling the fears and aspirations of the space-race 1950s, Japanese toy robots can’t be beat. But how much do we really know about these tin creations, in hindsight one of Japan’s greatest postwar exports? In this interview, robot collector Justin Pinchot gives the backstory on Japanese tin toy robots and how they reflected the postwar psyche and values of both Japan and the U.S. Pinchot can be reached via toyraygun.com, which is a member of our Hall of Fame.
Everyone is always looking for the next big thing. In the 1960s, it was going into space. In the ’40s and ’50s, the frontier was technology, with a particular focus on “What’s going to make our lives easier?” For the very first time, you had cars with automatic-transmissions, automatic washing machines, and perpetually cooling refrigerators.
I mean, we were coming out of an era when you scrubbed your clothes on a washboard and cooled your icebox with a big block of ice.
Even the first electric wristwatch, introduced around 1957, was a marvelous innovation. Prior to that, you had to wind your watch every day, and if you forgot, your watch wound down and stopped and you didn’t know what time it was.
Robots fit into that drive for convenience. They were going to be the next big thing. Everyone would have a personal robot, like Rosie the robot on “The Jetsons,” who would do your chores for you.
The idea was that if we had things like robots to make life easier, we’d be able to be more productive, make more money, and be more prosperous.
Later, of course, we realized, that we needed robots to build cars and help us get into space. That’s when real robotics came into play.
Collectors Weekly: Why were people in the West fearful of robots?
Pinchot: The worry was always that the robot would gain too much intelligence and decide what it wanted to do on its own. A big theme in early science fiction was that the robots we created would run amok. It’s still pervasive today with computers. Are computers ever going to get to the point where they can have emotions, or where they can make decisions that we didn’t tell them to make?
When I was a kid, I thought Japanese tin toys were kind of cheesy.
That fear surrounds all technology is embodied by toy robots because they’re designed to encourage fantasy. It’s easy to fantasize that a robot’s going to take over, take your money, or somehow direct your life in the wrong direction.
When I was a kid, I feared robots. Toy companies deliberately made them big to amplify that fear factor. It’s the same thrill that makes kids run to horror films. We know the fear factor is not real, but it’s fun to pretend. Part of the allure of robots, for sure, is that they resemble us, but they’re not us. We created them, but there’s always the possibility that something can go horribly wrong.
Collectors Weekly: How were robots viewed in Japan?
Pinchot: Well, the real rise in modern-day toy robots stems from the postwar Japanese robots. Japan was rebuilding, with U.S. encouragement. There had been a well-established tin toy business in Japan prior to the war, so it was pretty easy for them to pick back up and continue to produce toys.
The atom bomb had a major impact on the marketing and packaging of postwar Japanese robots. It was the story of a giant, technologically advanced superpower, crushing another superpower. That whole theme got translated into space toys and robots. If you look at some of the early robot boxes, you will see robots stomping through cityscapes, causing destruction as they go—that was a metaphor for what had happened with the bombs.
I can’t speak for how robots were viewed in Japan, but they certainly seemed to latch onto whatever the U.S. market found fascinating. The U.S. perception of robots came before the war, in the 1930s, when Jules Verne novels and Buck Rogers serials were popular. It was the decade of Art Deco and Cubist geometry, which was infiltrating design at that time and also influenced how we imagined robots.
The idea of automatons doing our work for us was big in the ’3