Yokohama has become the giant robot spider capital of the world! Because it now has one giant robot spider! Also, I'm aware that a significant fraction of blogs have written about this before me, but then that's proportionately how much lazier I am than other bloggers.
A four-storey high robot spider built by the crazy French scientists La Machine called, for some reason, La Princesse, is now living next to Yokohama Bay. Apparently this is to start five months of celebrations marking Yokohama's 150th birthday. The spider is supposed to represent "networking" and "reaching out to contact distant places", because spiders build webs and, um, walk. But of course this spider doesn't build webs, slightly weakening the already flimsy analogy.
It certainly walks though! You can watch it walking here, amidst music, lights, and exclamations of "Sugoi!".
Sugoi indeed. It would be even sugoier if they could orchestrate some kind of battle between La Princesse and the huge fuck-off robot beetle built by a 60 year old man from Ibaraki over a period of eleven years that was recently shown on tv. The beetle, called Kabutomu RX3 (kabuto-mushi being the word for a rhinoceros beetle), can be piloted from a cockpit or remote controlled, and has space for six passengers. Here's a video, ripped by Japan Probe, of the beetle, amidst music, lights, and exclamations of "Sugoi!" of course.
If you need more pictures - and frankly who doesn't? - you can find spider pictures in the wonderful Pink Tentacle coverage and beetle pictures in Technotaku.
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