TOKYO — Katsuyoshi Tagami, an engineer at Honda Motor Co., spent a decade building a secret product: a two-legged humanoid robot, one of the first of its kind. But as he was about to go public with his creation, he was seized with doubt: Might religious leaders object that Honda was playing God?
Tagami did some research and could find no other groups at the time working on a two-legged robot. "There were six-legged robots and four-legged ones, even a one-legged hopping robot. But no two-legged robots. That made us a little nervous."
Tagami ultimately went all the way to Rome to consult a Vatican theologian over his doubts and emerged with assurances that the Catholic Church wouldn't complain. The 4-foot-tall tubby-looking robots that resulted, named Asimo, can dance, shake hands and answer simple questions.
But they can't answer this one: Why is one of the world's leading carmakers producing morally correct robots?
Honda insists its robot project — which someone familiar with it says cost "tens of millions" of dollars — will pay real dividends. Last month, the company said it will use Asimo's leg technology to make devices that handicapped people or the elderly can strap on to assist them in walking. Though the population of Asimos numbers only six now, Hiroyuki Yoshino, Honda's president, says the company eventually will sell Asimos to consumers for about the cost of a car.
But Asimo has less to do with the profit motive than with Honda's unusual engineer-dominated culture, and Japan's long and peculiar love affair with robots. Asimo originated two decades ago as a morale-boosting exercise. Honda's motorcycle engineers, including Yoshino, felt burned out from a market-share fight in the late '70s and early '80s with rival Yamaha Motor Co., which Honda won.
Yoshino and his men were distressed because they didn't really see themselves as metal peddlers but, rather, as acolytes of founder Soichiro Honda, an engine-building legend who once strapped a NASA jet pack to his back. In the soul-searching that arose amid the marketing war, company leaders decided they must set a noble goal to motivate the engineers, who then as now, were considered the soul of the company.
We wanted "to accomplish something that could be helpful somehow to human life," recalls Yoshino, now 61.
He called together a half-dozen other engineers in 1981 at a research lab to brainstorm new projects. They considered bio-engineering before settling on robots and tossed around possible uses, such as nursing and housekeeping.
Japan's culture of tinkering eventually idealistically embraced robots, as in the 1950s comic-book series "Mighty Atom," in which a grieving scientist builds a crime-fighting robot in the likeness of his dead son.
By 1996, Honda's robot team had a robot named P-2 that could climb stairs and turn on a light switch. As Honda was preparing to unveil it, Yoshino saw a CNN report about a violent demonstration by a group of fundamentalists in the U.S., says Tagami, who saw the same dispatch. "They were a kind of militia group, with military uniforms and rifles," he recalls. "Yoshino said he was shocked to realize these radical fundamentalists existed."
The news stirred the worry that religious groups might object to machines in human form, because that would make the robot a public-relations disaster. The Honda men figured, from having seen Hollywood movies, that Americans were paranoid about robots. In the West, "robots are seen as laborers and take jobs from humans," says Tagami. "Soon they are ruling humans."
And so in December 1996, Yoshino sent Tagami to Rome to see the Rev. Joseph Pittau, then rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University and today an archbishop in charge of Catholic education worldwide. Soichiro Honda knew Father Pittau from his posting as president of Sophia University in Japan.
In the cleric's office, Tagami laid out Honda's fears. The company thought Catholics, especially, might oppose their humanoid-robot project because of the church's opposition to human cloning and a suspicion that that might extend to androids.
In response, Father Pittau suggested they walk to the Sistine Chapel. Father Pittau showed Tagami Michelangelo's mural of God creating man.
"This is the moment God put the spark of life into Adam, imbuing him with judgment and imagination," Tagami recalls the priest saying. By building a robot, you're "using your imagination to make something useful," not playing God.
Archbishop Pittau, in a faxed response to a reporter's questions, confirms he met Tagami and told him that any robot that helps people, especially the sick or handicapped, "would be welcome." But, he adds: "I do not remember hearing or speaking of 'humanoid' robots."
On New Year's Eve, with about half of Japanese households tuned in, Asimo ambled onto the stage of a live TV show in one of its first ventures outside the laboratory. But Asimo may prove useful even without additional intellectual wherewithal. Honda's current top robot engineer, Masato Hirose, says Honda will try refining Asimo's hands so it might, for example, be able to follow an order to fetch a can of beer from the refrigerator. Tagami retired from Honda in April 1999 and is now a visiting professor at a technical college.
If Asimo doesn't faze churchmen, it may pose a threat to people on the lower rungs of the entertainment business. Honda plans to rent the robot as a guide in museums or to perform at weddings.
Yoshino also imagines robots may someday sweep landmines, serve as seeing-eye dogs or work in nuclear-power plants. But there is one idea he has nixed: robo-warriors. Shortly after Honda unveiled Asimo, Yoshino says, a senior officer in the Chinese military requested a demonstration. Honda, he says, politely declined.