I'm Japanese, and this is the first I've heard of Gakutensoku. If you asked people in Japan for an old Japanese "robot", I think most would come up with this tea-carrying karakuri doll. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakuri_puppet

That one predates the word "robot" entirely. The design is documented in a 1796 book called "Karakuri Zui", so Edo period, shoguns still in charge.

Yeah, I was about to object that this is essentially a large automaton of which there are tons of earlier examples from Japan.

Picture of the rebuilt robot: https://www.nippon.com/en/views/b00906/

The Wikipedia page doesn't say: what happened to this robot?

> the details of its disappearance are unknown

A mystery! Someone will know...

I can find references to:

* Appearance in Korea at an expo (1928, 1929?): https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/landing/article.kci?arti_id=...

* The creator writing about it in 1931 (reference 10 on the same page)

Shanghai but uncertain date.

Was it dismantled in either Korea or China, or shipped back and dismantled, or destroyed?

"the 7'8" tall automaton would start his performance by touching a mace to his head before he proceeded to write out Chinese characters...

"touring Germany when he was somehow lost...

"In 2008, the Osaka Science Museum produced a new Gakutensoku. At 10'6", the new golden-skinned automata...

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/gakutensoku

--- More on Nishimura & motives: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-short-strange-life-of-the-firs...

I like to think he's in some wealthy parlor somewhere, sequestered away, bringing mirth and humanity to an elite few who need it most of all.

I have zero knowledge of Japanese but in the description's first line it is 學天則, but in the picture the text is 則天學.

When Japanese is written horizontally, it can be read either left->right or right->left. (occasionally, quite bewildering)

I have only seen right->left on signs; I have never seen it in books or magazines.

It's technically not right-to-left. It's columnar top-to-bottom (縦書き), with the columns right-to-left.

In signage you can have one character per column (kind of like one word per row on some English signs), making it look like right-to-left text.

I've mostly seen it on the right side of vehicle livery.

Automaton