Was Astro Boy the first Japanese robot character?
There were pseudo-robot characters that appeared previous to Astro Boy, but he is arguably the first autonomous android robot figure in Japan. Right around the same time there was also another robot character creation that was not an autonomous robot. It was a remote-controlled robot. So there are these two streams of robot characters, one the autonomous android robot like Astro Boy, and the other one, the remote controlled robot, which later develops into the drivable robot in the Gundam and other series like that. But in Astro Boy in the secondary characters there are the models for the transforming robots, combining robots, and drivable robots, it’s all there, but Astro Boy himself is an autonomous robot, and in that sense he is very human — he can walk, he can think, but he is dependent on humans in that he needs regular refueling. He needs little pellets of uranium. How does Astro Boy fit into the history of the pervasive robot culture of Japan? I wrote an entire book about the J
