The affection of a certain island nation for all things robotic — fromAhundred foot tall warfighting mecha toAinfantile therapy robots — is well known. It contrasts sharply with the equally entrenched Western fear of automatons, beginning with the very invention of the term "robot," which was coined in aACzech play that debuted in 1921 in which, naturally, the robots eventually rise up and kill their human masters.

How could two cultures come to such fundamentally divergent conclusions about the status and future of the semi-autonomous helpmates whose increasing presence in our lives seems pre-ordained by nearly every sci-fi vision of the future?

Heather Knight,Afounder of the world’s first (non-industrial) robot census, has made the study of robot / human interaction her life’s work. She posits that the difference between Japanese and American attitudes toward robots is rooted in something much older than even the idea of robots: religion. "In Japan… they’re culturally open to robots, on account of animism. They don’t make a distinction between inanimate objects and humans."

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