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.
ginko 23 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I was about to object that this is essentially a large automaton of which there are tons of earlier examples from Japan.
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.
> the details of its disappearance are unknown
A mystery! Someone will know...
* 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?
"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...
I have only seen right->left on signs; I have never seen it in books or magazines.
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.