Background

It was at the very end of the year 2000, on my way back to my hometown, Nagano. From the train window, I saw the front parts of a rusted tractor poking out from a thick blanket of snow. Just before midnight at my parents’ home, I heard the tolling of New Year's Eve bell from a Buddhist temple 108 times, the number of human's worldly desires. 

Then, as the year 2001 began, they also began stirring in my head.

The snowed tractor got its limbs and began walking through the snow.

Soon after, other abandoned and buried machines, one by one, emerged from pure white snow.

These images goaded me into portraying 108 robots.

Concept Story

For how many days had rain, storm, and drought been befalling

upon the rugged stretch of machine rubbish?

At the bottom of the heap of scraps silently corroding little by little,
lay a huge iron plate like a lid over the ground. 

It was there, appearing fearsomely black and awesomely heavy
like a gate blocking the way to hell.

Right in the middle of the rusted plate
was a small crack appearing even blacker.

The crack covered with red rust grew bigger and bigger
by some kind of force pushing and knocking it up from inside.

Something was about to come into the world from the big crack.

At that very moment, a head-like part made an appearance
followed by parts looking like arm, torso, and legs.

Its body, soaked with glistening fluid like black greasy oil,
and its limbs, wrapped with electric cords 

growing out of some parts of the body,
crawled around on the iron plate flopping its limbs.

 

It was moving ramblingly like a new-born baby,

but after a while it ripped the cords down on its own will. 

Tumbling over on the plate with loud crashing noise,
it was waddling away in small steps from the birth canal of the earth.

―Where on earth are you going?―

In the meantime, cracks were multiplying on the black huge plate,
each giving birth to differently shaped machine-bodied things. 

Then, headed for all directions, they were gone. 

From 108 canals carved on its own body,
the mother iron mass had sent her 108 children into the world.

Again, in the silence on the stretch of machine rubbish
she continued to pile up layers of time as if nothing had happened.