RUDYARD KIPLING made that poetic observation over 100 years ago, but to
robot collectors who've ever harbored a dream of hopping on the Concorde and doing
a clean sweep of the toy shows in Japan, it might just as well have been written
yesterday, 'cause it still seems valid. To a Westerner; the Land of the Rising Sun
is a minefield of potential intimidations -- mispronounce a word slightly and you've
called your host's wife a water buffalo, read a road sign incorrectly and end up
in Okinawa. And then there's the cultural barrier. Are all Americans loud, badly-mannered
oafs, or do they just appear that way because the Japanese, by contrast, are so deeply
polite and introverted? There is an irrefutable art to conducting business with Japanese
toy dealers, and one of the few Americans who seems to have mastered it is Minneapolis
- based robot and space toy professional Robert Johnson.
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"I hold him in very high esteem for a number of reasons. He used to find very rare toys
over there and would sell them to me. We developed a very friendly relationship that worked
out well for both of us. I ended up being able to build a terrific collection, and he was
happy to be paid in U.S. dollars, since the yen was way down back then. Years later, I ended
up selling the same toys I had bought from him to customers he had introduced me to. It
did not matter at all to him that I was selling to people who, instead, could have been
buying from him. He's a very honorable person, from a good family background. When I
sold my robot collection, I wasn't doing it as a dealer; I was doing it to raise cash
for personal reasons, and he realized that. Ironically, I had no idea who I was really
selling to, but they were the families behind Fuji and Sony. I didn't know that at the
time, because the names were not the same.