Japan Invented Humanoid Robots—Now It's Buying Them From China

The Geminoid HI-6 opened the Humanoids Summit with a philosophical monologue about the blurring line between humans and robots. It's the sixth-generation android twin of Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, now loaded with an LLM trained on his own writings — eerie, impressive, and very Japanese. But it was also one of the only Japanese humanoids in the room.

While Geminoid mused about the future, Beijing's Booster Robotics K1 bots were moonwalking to Michael Jackson. Unitree's G1 — a full-scale humanoid that went on sale in 2024 for $16,000 — was doing live demos. A Chinese startup even showed a mini biped with an anime-girl head for $3,500. Japan, the country that built the world's first full-scale humanoid in 1973 and wowed the world with Honda's ASIMO for two decades, is now watching Chinese machines colonize its own conferences.

How did this happen? The short version: Japan built robots for wonder, not for work. ASIMO was retired in 2022 — the same year ChatGPT launched — without ever becoming a commercial product. Meanwhile, China's government backed young founders in their 20s and 30s who skipped the philosophy and went straight to mass production. The result: China now operates roughly 2 million industrial robots, about 4.5 times Japan's total, and installed 54% of all robots deployed worldwide in 2024. Japan, which led global manufacturing robot density from at least 1994 to 2009, has since slid to fifth place. South Korea's density is now nearly three times Japan's.

McKinsey partner Ani Kelkar puts a number on the opportunity Japan is at risk of missing: $100 billion in general-purpose robotics. The catch is that Japan's edge — precision hardware, deep manufacturing know-how — isn't enough anymore. The new game is AI, software, and data at scale, and Japan "missed the rapid acceleration in AI for robotics," as Kelkar puts it. The parallel to Japan's mobile internet story is brutal: in 1999, Japan launched the world's first mobile internet platform. It did not become a smartphone power. It became a parts supplier.

Waseda University's Tetsuya Ogata is trying to break that pattern. His nonprofit AIRoA has assembled what he claims is the world's largest dataset for remote robot operation — 80,000 hours — and is building shared AI foundation models with Toyota and others. The pitch: stop hoarding data inside individual companies, build a pre-competitive open infrastructure, and use it to attract global partners. Become a "third pole" alongside the US and China. It's a smart play, if Japan can actually execute the culture shift it requires.

Japan's humanoids could still stand for something — craftsmanship, reliability, the same brand promise that made its cars and cameras global staples. But the window isn't open forever. China isn't waiting.