Japan Pioneered Humanoid Robots—Can It Now Catch China?

Japan, the country that built the first full-scale humanoid robot in 1973, has surrendered its early lead in the field to China, which now dominates the sector through mass production, aggressive government backing, and a rapidly expanding industrial-robot ecosystem [1]. The shift was on stark display at the recent Humanoids Summit in Tokyo, where Chinese systems outnumbered Japanese robots by roughly three to one. Some Japanese firms even used Chinese-made machines in their own demonstrations, a scene one local engineer described as “sad” [1]. The conference featured Geminoid HI-6, an android twin of Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro first designed in 2006, now equipped with a large language model trained on Ishiguro’s writings. But it was one of the few Japanese humanoids present [1]. Japan’s pioneering work began at Waseda University, where scientists built WABOT-1 in 1973. The machine could walk slowly, grasp objects, and communicate simply, inspiring Honda’s Asimo, which was eventually retired in 2022 [1]. Yet these breakthroughs were never commercialized at scale. “Big players in Japan are still looking for use cases for humanoids. In China, they’re already doing mass production and reducing the cost, so other countries can’t compete with them anymore,” said Shuichi Nagao, CTO of Omakase Robotics [1]. China’s ascent is backed by hard numbers. The International Federation of Robotics estimates China now operates roughly 2 million industrial robots, about 4.5 times more than Japan, and accounted for 54 percent of all robots installed worldwide in 2024 [1]. Japan’s manufacturing robot density—the number of multipurpose industrial robots per 10,000 employees—has slipped from first place in 1994 to fifth in 2024, with a density of 446, compared to leader South Korea’s 1,220 [1]. Japan’s broader manufacturing sector remains formidable; it is the world’s third-largest manufacturing output and is home to giants such as Toyota, the largest automaker globally, producing about 10 million vehicles per year [2][3]. Ani Kelkar, a McKinsey & Company partner, told the summit that Japan’s loss of leadership is tied to China’s rise as a manufacturing powerhouse in sectors where Japan once had high export levels. “The recovery has not yet happened as Japan ‘missed’ the rapid acceleration in AI for robotics and is now playing catchup,” Kelkar said [1]. McKinsey sees a US $100 billion opportunity for Japan in general-purpose robotics, but capturing it will require a shift toward AI, software, and data collection [1]. Tetsuya Ogata, director of the Institute for AI and Robotics at Waseda, is pushing a collaborative approach. His nonprofit, the AI Robot Association, has collected 80,000 hours of data on remote operation of mobile manipulators and is working with Toyota and others to build shared foundation models. “The world of AI is inherently a game of scale,” Ogata said. “Japan’s absolute prerequisite is to secure a competitive baseline of scale—in data, computing resources, and talent” [1]. He advocates creating an open data ecosystem to establish a “third pole” alongside the United States and China [1]. Regulatory hurdles also constrain Japanese firms. “You cannot sell these bipedal systems in Japan for safety and compliance reasons,” Nagao said, contrasting Japan’s environment with China’s government-driven push, where developers in their 20s and 30s are driving the industry forward [1]. Unitree Robotics of Hangzhou now sells its G1 humanoid for US $16,000, while Beijing-based Booster Robotics showed kid-size K1 machines dancing at the Tokyo summit [1].