Even a robot assistant can’t help you make sense of Japan

The late A.A. Gill, in his notorious ‘Mad in Japan’ essay, concluded that the only way you could make sense of Tokyo was to think of it as a vast open-air lunatic asylum, with inmates instead of residents. Gill would have loved Arisa.

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anything more stereotypically Japanese than Arisa. She’s a multilingual robot concierge at Nishi-Shinjuku station in central Tokyo, one of the thousands of new automatons installed in the city ahead of the Olympics next month. She has a rather creepy Doctor Who look to her — she could be Davros’s girlfriend — and she’s there to assist tourists. I considered testing Arisa by asking how to get to the famous Budokan concert hall, in the hope that she’d answer ‘Practise!’; but I’m not sure she’s programmed for humour.

The eccentricity of Japan is all-enveloping and inescapable: the frighteningly shrill screamed chorus of ‘Welcome’ whenever you enter a shop; the bizarre Japanese–English on packaging and billboards, hastily ‘translated’, presumably by non-native speakers, and apparently never checked.