We don’t find Fujii, so I leave the campus with little more than a glimpse of the world behind Inaba’s forest: a clock above the entrance to the main research facility that ticks at 10 times the usual speed, as if innovation can’t happen quickly enough for the world leader in factory automation technology, plus several 40,000-square-foot factories, each of which contains hundreds of bright yellow Fanuc robots working around the clock to build other Fanuc robots, stopping only when no storage space remains. Some robots will be shipped elsewhere in Japan, where strict immigration policies and a declining birthrate have left manufacturers of all sizes more dependent on factory automation. But most are bound for China.

Automation has been rising over the past decade there, partly because, as wages and living standards have risen, workers have proved less willing to perform dangerous, monotonous tasks, and partly because Chinese manufacturers are seeking the same efficiencies as their overseas counterparts. More and more, it’s Fanuc’s industrial robots that assemble and paint automobiles in China, construct complex motors, and make injection-molded parts and electrical components. At pharmaceutical companies, Fanuc’s sorting robots categorize and package pills. At food-packaging facilities, they slice, squirt, and wrap edibles.