Sushi is arguably Japan’s most famous gift to the world.  Loved for its uniqueness and delicate design, sushi should only be crafted by skilled hands developed over years of training and apprenticeship.

But with global demand for Japan’s signature dish rising every day it’s getting more and more difficult to produce enough skilled labor to meet it.  It’s during exactly these moments of weakness when the robots like to make their next move towards global domination.

Suzumo Machinery in Japan has released the Ultracompact Sushi Rice Robot last April during the World Food and Beverage Great Expo 2012. Suzumo boasts their machine to be capable of producing a whopping 3,600 pieces of nigirizushi (the sushi with the fish on top of a small ball of rice) per hour.

According to Guiness World Records, Joakim Lundblad of Sweden is the fastest sushi maker mankind has to offer at 12 norimakizushi (the sushi rolled in a tube of seaweed) made in 2 minutes.  And although comparing nigirizushi and norimakizushi is like apples and oranges it’s safe to say the machine’s thumped us in terms of speed.

Anyways, this is clearly just the robots flexing their metallic muscle. Even in Japan, who needs to move 3,600 pieces of sushi per hour?  This also begs the million dollar question of how sushi produced in 1 second stacks up to that which was lovingly made by a human.

It’s hard to imagine that the cold steel talons of those dreaded machines can create sushi as beautiful in looks and taste as that of a pair of warm loving experienced hands.

Judging by the robot’s propaganda video shot in their typical fashion with cheesy porno music in the background (clearly a trick to lower our mental resistance to their subliminal messages) they seem to do a pretty good job of mimicking their “meatbag” rivals’ techniques.

For now we will have to wait and see how robot sushi actually tastes, or maybe they’re already among us.  There could be a robot lurking in the back kitchen of your local sushi joint as we speak.  They’ve already infiltrated our armed forces, hair salons, and warehouses.

These sushi robots may look harmless enough but it’s just a matter of time before they go haywire and start crushing people in their Nigirizushi death rollers, just like in this documentary I saw one time called Maximum Overdrive.

Source: Gizmodo (Japanese)