The erotic guitars, decaying machines, and soy sauce of Maker Faire Tokyo

I arrived at the venue shortly after the 10 o’clock opening, walking past the giant 4-ton mech robot standing inside the building’s 5-storey rotunda. Across the room, hundreds of people were packed in narrow aisles between the long rows of tables, trying to get a look at standout projects like Charonix Design Works’s Audio Spectrum Analyzer. Made out of 112 Russian IN–13 bargraph Nixie tubes, the thing looked like a steampunk iTunes visualizer, and I wasn’t exactly in the market I was still a little disappointed to hear it wasn’t for sale. Nearby, I spotted a pair of soccer robots from Asagami Works’s work-in-progress of a robot soccer team. The two young men behind the table are hopeful that one day they’ll be able to compete in the RoboCup (one is a former team member), even though so far they could only afford to build three $1,200 robots. To their knowledge, they’re the only private, self-funded team — typically, the league is for university squads that can afford as much as $150,000 for a squad of six top-tier machines.

The seventh floor housed some of the Maker Faire’s music-related projects, perhaps the most interesting of which was a makeshift guitar fashioned out of a mannequin leg and a touchscreen. Playing it caused a nearby TV to emit erotic noises to the amusement of nearby attendees. Elsewhere, Kyoto Sangyo University showed off a bathtub outfitted with a Theramin-like instrument that let you make music while you soak.

Back downstairs, I noticed Yoshihiro Hyodo’s “decaying machines” — robots that are made entirely from paper, aside from a few wooden drive shafts and the rubber bands that supply the power. “In my old job I used to work in manufacturing,” Hyodo explained. “Working with machinery made me wonder if I could make a robot out of paper instead.” Frustrated that his creations walked with an unimpressive shuffle, he decided to turn to YouTube for inspiration, noticing that all the other bipedal robots’ ankles flexed laterally — the key to the success of his later models. “It was about 90 percent steady work and 10 percent inspiration,” he explained. “I just do it because it’s fun.”

Later, as I was on my way to the door I noticed one of the plastic soy sauce bottles you see in Japanese diners next to a fake plastic egg. The placard named it accurately as the “pouring too much soy sauce machine” — as I picked up a bottle and tried to pour a responsible amount of soy sauce on my egg, a motion sensor commanded the second bottle to flood my plate with the stuff. I asked its maker if he was struck by some kind of desire to have too much soy sauce. “I just got this idea, and like an idiot I wondered if I could make it into a machine,” said the builder, named Ishikawa. Not the most flattering way to put it, I thought, but we could probably all stand to be idiots a little more often.

Sam Byford contributed to this photo essay.