Japan builds robots as receptionists, retail clerks, and news presenters, and treats them with an affection Western societies rarely extend to machines. Director Rob van Hattum sets out to explain that gap, touring Tokyo's Robot Restaurant and its dazzling stage automatons before turning to the Aibo robotic dog, whose owners hold a soul-removal ceremony, complete with chanting and drums, when the body finally fails. Sociologist Naho Kitano argues that Japanese animism, in which objects already have souls, makes accepting an intelligent robot a much smaller leap than it is in the West, where religious and ethical anxieties dominate. Roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro introduces one of his Geminoid androids, an unnervingly lifelike double that invites touch and talks about fear, its movements still stiff enough to remind you what it is. Philosopher Daniel Dennett makes the opposite case from the other direction, arguing humans are themselves robots built of robots, brains running on cultural software. Professor Vanessa Evers shows social robots designed for museum tours and airport navigation, machines meant to read what you actually mean.