Make Believe Mailer 03: I, Robot Restaurant
Yeah, like I'm going to pay the equivalent of $80 for this
In the past ten years, Japan has enjoyed record-breaking numbers of tourists coming to the country for leisure. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has pretty much wiped out that industry for the time being — the latest figures show a 99.9 percent drop in inbound visitors compared to the year prior — and the future remains uncertain. Perhaps people will one day funnel back through immigration, but the actual experience of escaping into Japan will be different in whatever world emerges from this moment. It means 2020 marks the end of an era, one highlighted by the fake Mario Karts in Tokyo, angry locals in Kyoto and Robot Restaurant.
I try my hardest to not think about Robot Restaurant, a headache-inducing slice of “Weird Japan” plunked down into the Kabukicho neighborhood of Shinjuku. I’ve dodged having to go, but I’ve heard from friends visiting and locals accompanying those on vacation who wanted to check out the silliness, and hearing their stories is all I need — a nonsensical show that asks “can all the 500 yen costumes at Don Quijote factor into this?,” topped off by overpriced bento and canned chu-hai. Yet I’m part of the cynical minority (aka the English-language Tokyo community), because Robot Restaurant became one of the destinations for tourists coming to the capital — Wikipedia data might not be the most trustworthy, but if we go with it, the store’s attendance went up every year heading into 2020.
It didn’t cross my mind much that Robot Restaurant has been closed for the majority of the year until this story, about the owner of the venue hosting a Nazi-themed party in 2017, but once it did, thoughts of giant humanoid-looking vehicles and laser tanks became lodged in my head. It’s easy to scoff at, but Robot Restaurant did serve as a vital landmark for visitors into the country looking for some 21st century exotica and a “zany” experience during the 2010s. It became one of the most broadcast images of the country to the world over the last decade, via TV shows, YouTube uploads and music videos.
That last one has always fascinated me, so with the spot back on my mind — and it’s glory days now behind it — lets dig into the history of Robot Restaurant through the many music videos filmed within its Technicolor den, both domestic and international. Perhaps you will never have a chance to watch the stupidity in person again, but that’s for the best — it’s now a time capsule of how Japan appeared on a global stage.
2012 — 2013
Total Number Of Tourists To Japan: 8.4 Million (2012), Over 10 Million (2013)
The first piece of press written about Robot Restaurant came from the Daily Mail, the surest sign that something is cursed. “Perhaps in Tokyo it's not quite as alarming to see a flatbed truck with two gigantic robotic women driving through traffic…” goes the opening sentence, immediately riddled with lies (it’s not) and establishing how this entertainment spot would be cast in the media. That wasn’t limited to foreign attention, as domestic media approached it with the same goofy attitude (I’m a fan of this news piece, featuring a reporter speaking like a robot). Tokyo is filled with short-lived novelties, and perhaps Robot Restaurant wouldn’t last more than a year. Yet it kept going and growing, its international image for kookiness swelling alongside it.
Then Muse featured it prominently in the 2013 video for “Panic Station,” and its reputation was set.
Muse weren’t the first group to share a video prominently featuring Robot Restaurant. Now-forgotten Kyary Pamyu Pamyu associates AMIAYA can claim firsties on this, while funkot-leaning idol group hy4_4yh beat the British band to it by a week. Yet nobody outside of Japan was seeking out either of those acts, whereas plenty more encountered “Panic Station,” a dip into two Edward-Said-baiting tropes (the weirdness of Japan coupled with the idea the country is technologically ahead of the game). It’s a remarkable clip for a lot of reasons — Muse’s video predates Shibuya Halloween and Logan Paul’s ill fated Japan trip, but exudes the exact same vibe as both — but the key is it centered Robot Restaurant as something crazy and uniquely Japanese.
That image only lit up even more as 2013 carried on. By the end of the year, Anthony Bourdain introduced it as a representation of “subterranean life,” popular Japan-based YouTubers went to it, and even The Guardian offered a write up (tellingly, only featuring other English speakers). Australian dance producer DCUP offered a more tasteful representation in the video for “Don’t Be Shy,” which simply cast Robot Restaurant as a date spot, while a pre-PC-Music-grazed Charli XCX posed on the stairwell and danced with the costumed robots for the “SuperLove” clip. That one, below, might be an even better summary of what this sci-fi dinner theater really became. It lacks the over-the-top buffoonery of “Panic Station,” but it’s ultimately just a bunch of Westerners indulging in a fantasy image of the city.
2014 - 2015
Total Number Of Tourists To Japan: Over 13 million (2014), 19.73 million (2015)
The next two years of Robot Restaurant music videos saw a wide variety of bands see how the overpriced eatery could fit into their artistic vision. Guy Pearce wandered through the gauche halls of Robot Restaurant and another equally sensory-overloading host club in the video for “Taste,” above, while Barcelona band Daylight followed DCUP’s lead in framing it as a spot for love to blossom. A lot of repeating tropes also start emerging — Sweden’s Tove Styrke followed Charli XCX’s lead and added a dash of Lost In Translation for “Ego,” sitting stoically on a neon tank before living it up with her Nordic friends. Australian dinguses Vaudeville Smash, meanwhile, indulged in two common practices you might have picked up on if you watch all of these — seemingly getting in the way of Japanese people just trying to go about their lives, and leering at women wearing school sailor suits (though I guess they at least have a twist in this one but yeeeeesh). Credit to this hardcore band for just making the robots look like spooky knights rather than play around with techno-Orientalism.
Japanese artists, albeit largely relatively under-the-radar acts, continued to flock to the space too. Techno-pop idols Cupitron set their debut music video in Robot Restaurant, while DJ Jet Baron leaned into Kabukicho’s sleazier image for one upload. The biggest nudge into the spotlight came from idol group Bullet Train, who used Robot Restaurant’s Lite Brite stage as a platform for this clip. That’s something K-pop unit Block B did for the Japanese version of “Her” at around the same time, removing all robot references from the Robot Restaurant in favor of...near nothingness. It’s almost transgressive.
By the time German rappers were utilizing the space as a sign that, hey, we made it to Tokyo, Japan’s transformation into a tourist hotspot was confirmed, and Robot Restaurant was part of the soft power landscape. Gaze upon the press section from these years to see an avalanche of magazines and websites eagerly soaking up the strangeness — “With a future-carnivalesque atmosphere and enough psychedelic wattage to put Las Vegas to shame, Robot Restaurant is also something of man-machine Pop performance art,” goes a Vice blog post. It also colored the way other artists approached their music videos — I thought A$AP Rocky’s “L$D (LOVE x $EX x DREAMS)” played out largely in Robot Restaurant until finding out...nope, that was the same host club from the Pearce video. Yet it offered all the same chintzy flair with different visuals to boot (that club is now closed, another victim of a rapidly changing Shinjuku).
Yet around the same time, a music video set a few stops over signaled a sea change in how Tokyo would be portrayed in music videos. It feels quaint in 2020, but Avril Lavigne’s “Hello Kitty” delivered discussions about cultural appropriation and exoticization in English-language media. Every criticism could have been lobbed at any other video on this list, but this was the moment the way people approached the topic changed, at least a little bit. There’s only so many ways to make an eatery sporting dinosaurs and military-themed dancers feel run of the mill.
2016 - 2017
Total Number Of Tourists To Japan: Over 24 million (2016), over 28 million (2017)
“Wacky” and “weird” Japan started to fade — or, at least, fade into a different form. The spectacle of the Robot Restaurant show took a backseat to the aesthetic of the Robot Restaurant, signaling a shift from the video-centric days of watching Human Tetris clips to an image-based embrace of all things traditional and neon. Vic Mensa and Skirllex’s video for “No Chill” might be the bridge between the old and new approach, finding room for a robot playing a keytar in the store’s lobby area, but never dwelling on it (and also presenting it as drug-trip fueled). While it’s still infatuated with the idea of an “underground” Tokyo, that sub-culture isn’t strange...it’s just exclusive, something only those in the know are aware about.
You know, not like the tourists lining up for Robot Restaurant.
All of the outlandish elements of Robot Restaurant are nowhere to be seen on HONNE and Izzy Bizu’s “Someone That Loves You” video, and you would have no idea they even stepped down those jungle-themed stairs if this one wasn’t listed on the Robot Restaurant media list. Yet the couple central to this clip — full of glowing Tokyo cityscapes and geisha — walk through it and act lovey dovey...do they charge you less if they don’t have to turn the tank on? It’s @AestheticsJapan in a short-form video, made all the funnier by HONNE being named after the concept of “honne,” which would be like me naming this mailing list “Wabi Sabi.” Yet they predicted a wave of videos where simply showing as much as Tokyo as possible was better than finding something oddball, and the more neon lights and katakana, the better (let’s nod to two Western video from 2013 — Clean Bandit’s “Rather Be” and The Weeknd’s “Kiss Land” — which were way ahead of realizing a more anodyne presentation of the country would be most agreeable with Western audiences, and that slathering katakana on everything tricks people into thinking you are a genius). Ozuna and Jake Bugg both walked by Robot Restaurant in videos filmed in Japan, but they don’t need to. Besides, they have so many other parts of the city to film (or in the prior’s case, hang out with his own mascot…is that a Japan nod?).
Who’s left to pick up the slack? J-pop groups, like AKB48, who set a large chunk of 2016’s “High Tension” in the middle of a Robot Restaurant performance. Here’s an example of a kind of self-congratulatory look at the triumphs of Japanese tourism, a common theme in TV shows where Japanese camera crews talk to arriving foreigners at the airport to discover why they’ve come to Japan (with the underlying message aimed at domestic viewers being...oh, Japan is cool!). It’s goofy as hell, but also sort of charming in retrospect, especially compared to Instagram pics masquerading as videos from other creators. Japan isn’t weird...but it’s way more interesting than how these Western videos as of late present it, so I’ll take AKB48 getting a cavalcade of local talent to wave glow sticks around.
Me realizing I stayed up until 3 am writing about Robot Restaurant
2018 - 2019
Total Number Of Tourists To Japan: Over 31.2 million (2018), over 31.8 million (2019)
By now, Japan as a tourist destination has become a common concept, with the government revising tourism goals to over 40 million visitors in 2020, feeling good about what the definitely-going-to-happen Olympic Games can do to boost that data up even more. Yet that also means there is just more for tourists to do — and way more places for Western artists to film to underline who they are, in fact, in Japan. Taylor Swift’s “End Game,” above, is one of the few pop videos in the last two years to enter Robot Restaurant, and even then she and Ed Sheeran treat it like a really lux karaoke joint. Plenty of people were still packing in the place, but as a signifier of “crazy cool Japan,” the venue’s time had ended (save for...whatever this is). Hell, now England has a robot restaurant. So, who was left to visit it?
Robot Restaurant — welcome to middle age, where Will Smith will stop by to film you for his YouTube channel and look on in awe as a lady beats up a T-rex. Who needs music videos when a new era of established celebrities wading into the world of YouTube and Instagram can film it and their reactions to it, and begin the cycle all over again. This clip is a return to wacky, but now seen through the eyes of a 51-year-old megacelebrity. The youth have moved on to flexing in front of the fake Mario Karts and pretending to be Goku on a street corner — now it's time for the older set to be aghast at giant robots. “Weird Japan,” after all, is a relic of their days…why not they embrace it when the borders open up again?
