[ESSAY] “The Apocalypse Before Dinner: What Japanese Robots Taught Italian Children” by Gabriele Micozzi
For Italian children of my generation, Japanese animation did not arrive as a coherent archive.
I am on the left, with my younger brother Fabrizio, both of us wearing Goldrake shirts, around 1978 or 1979. I was about ten or eleven, and the photograph was taken around the time Goldrake first appeared on Italian television and entered our everyday lives.
On 4 April 1978, Italy imported the end of the world. It arrived on public television in the late afternoon, between homework and dinner, announced by a robot emerging from a waterfall. The programme was called Atlas UFO Robot (1975). We called the machine Goldrake. I was nine years old, six weeks short of ten, and understood immediately what the adults would spend years misunderstanding: this was not a machine pretending to be human. It was a human being trying not to become a machine.
My childhood copy of UFO Robot / Atlas UFO Robot, featuring Actarus and Goldrake on the cover. The record was one of the objects through which the series became part of everyday childhood in Italy, extending its presence beyond what we watched on television.
The distinction mattered because our afternoons were already crowded with machines that promised obedience. Cars, washing machines, factory lines, televisions: Italy had built its postwar miracle out of objects that worked when switched on. Goldrake came from another postwar country with a different message. Its machine worked too. That was the problem.
For Italian children of my generation, Japanese animation did not arrive as a coherent archive. It came out of order, renamed, dubbed and threaded between local presenters, advertising and the evening news. Goldrake, Jeeg, Mazinger and the older shadow of Godzilla reached us as entertainment from the future. Only much later did I understand that Japan had not sent us its future. It had sent us its memory.
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Godzilla carried the oldest memory. The 1954 film followed the Castle Bravo nuclear test and the irradiation of the Japanese fishing boat Daigo Fukuryū Maru. Its monster was not simply awakened by radiation; it was radiation given weight, appetite and a route through the city. A bomb ends. Godzilla continues walking.
Outside Japan, the creature could be reduced to a useful category: monster. Monsters are reassuring because they can be placed on posters, opposed by armies and made to return for sequels. But the first Godzilla does not behave like an invader. It behaves like a consequence. Tokyo is not attacked by something wholly foreign; it is crossed by what modernity has produced and cannot recall. The city sees its achievement return enlarged until no building can pretend to stand outside it.
That grammar survives in the robots, although the scale changes from city to body. Their recurring question is not whether technology is good or evil. It is more intimate: how much of a person must be surrendered before the machine agrees to save what remains?
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As a child, I saw the pleasure of transformation: the leap, the collision, the body completed in mid-air.
Jeeg gives the most literal answer. Hiroshi Shiba discovers that his father has remade him as a cyborg. To form the robot, Hiroshi does not climb into a cockpit and operate a superior tool. He becomes Jeeg’s head. The rest of the body arrives in magnetic components and assembles itself around him.
As a child, I saw the pleasure of transformation: the leap, the collision, the body completed in mid-air. As an adult, I see an act of parental love so absolute that it abolishes consent. Hiroshi’s father saves his son by deciding what his son’s body will be needed for. The gift and the violation occupy the same metal. The machine does not conceal the human; it uses the human face as its locking mechanism.
Italy was especially prepared to mistake this for industrial optimism. We knew assembly. We lived among districts where a finished object emerged because different hands supplied different pieces at the correct moment. Jeeg made the supply chain heroic. Yet its image contains the opposite warning: when every part arrives on command, the only component that cannot be replaced is the one that feels the impact.
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Goldrake brought a different wound. Duke Fleed, Actarus in the Italian version, is not Earth’s triumphant native son. He is the survivor of a destroyed planet, living under another name in an adoptive landscape. When the forces that ruined his home approach Earth, he must enter the very technology that preserves the war inside him. Each launch is therefore both defence and relapse.
This was an extraordinary figure to place before Italian children in 1978. The hero was a refugee before we had been taught to use the word as a political identity. He worked on a farm, hid his origin and defended a home that was his because someone had received him, not because he had been born there. He was powerful precisely where he was displaced. The machine did not restore his lost world. It allowed him to prevent its repetition.
The victories were correspondingly strange. An episode could end with the enemy destroyed and Actarus still carrying the knowledge that victory had not brought his planet back. Western superheroes often protect a normal order presumed to exist beneath the emergency. Goldrake knew there was no undamaged normality waiting underneath. There was only the next day and the labour of keeping it from resembling the last one.
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The Italian adults who objected to these programmes often concentrated on visible violence: blades, fists, bodies joined to steel, cities under attack. They were not wrong about the violence. They were wrong about where it was located. The deepest violence had already happened before the episode began. A planet had been destroyed. A father had converted his son into equipment. A scientific achievement had returned as a radioactive animal. The battles were not the source of the trauma; they were its afterlife.
Italy had reasons of its own not to recognise this. Goldrake entered our homes during the Years of Lead, two years after Seveso had taught an industrial region that an invisible substance could alter bodies, animals and soil. The evening news already contained explosions, factories, demonstrations and official voices explaining that the situation was under control. Then the children’s programme began, and adults saw fantasy. Children saw the same world with honest dimensions.
The dubbing and renaming may even have intensified the lesson. Translation detached these figures from some of their original coordinates, but it also made room for an Italian intimacy. Actarus did not feel imported once he spoke from the television in our language. His exile entered our vocabulary before its history did. Cultural misunderstanding is not always an erasure. Sometimes it is the strange door through which an image becomes memory.
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Fear had to be radioactive. Grief needed a ruined planet. Anger required a robot’s fist.
What, then, did all this do to the children watching? It would be tempting to call us an alexithymic generation: boys trained to recognise a missile by name but unable to name what happened in the chest before crying. The word is too clinical for a generation, and the causal claim too neat. A television programme cannot diagnose its audience. Yet the question points towards something true. We did not necessarily feel less. We often needed feeling to arrive enlarged before we were permitted to recognise it.
Fear had to be radioactive. Grief needed a ruined planet. Anger required a robot’s fist. Tenderness was safest when hidden inside a cockpit, where a wounded pilot could bleed without having to explain himself. The monsters became emotional prostheses: external bodies large enough to carry what the domestic vocabulary could not. At home, a boy might be told that nothing had happened, not to make a scene, to finish his dinner. On television, a city could burn because something had happened and the scene was the only honest measure of it.
This was not exactly abulia, a failure of will. We were not inert; we ran, argued, collected cards, imitated launch sequences and invented battles in courtyards. The paralysis came elsewhere. Faced with ordinary sorrow, a father’s silence, a factory closing, a mother standing at the sink after bad news, we lacked the civilian words. When grief was human-sized, we looked away. When it was sixty metres tall, metallic or scaled, we understood it immediately.
The paradox is that these programmes may also have protected us from the muteness they seemed to encourage. A monster gives fear an address. A transformation sequence lends order to bodily confusion. A secret identity tells a child that a divided self is still a self. The armour did not abolish sensitivity; it gave sensitivity an exoskeleton. If many men of my generation learned late to speak about vulnerability, some of us first rehearsed it through Actarus, who could save a planet but not recover his own.
Perhaps the more troubling inheritance was not emotional poverty but emotional scale. We learned to wait for catastrophe before granting a feeling legitimacy. Fatigue became visible only as collapse; anxiety only as alarm; ecological damage only when the sea produced a monster. This habit has survived the cartoons. Public language still struggles to describe slow violence. A poisoned field, an exhausted worker or a displaced family must become spectacular before the system admits that an event has occurred.
The monsters therefore did not frighten us into passivity. They taught us, ambiguously, both concealment and recognition. They allowed fear to speak, but in costume. They gave sorrow a body, but one too large for the kitchen. Their legacy is the distance between having an emotion and possessing the language in which to return it to human scale.
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We thought Japan had sent us robots. It had sent us instructions for living after the end of the world.
I have spent much of my adult life inside organisations that describe people as functions and machines as solutions. Looking back, I suspect the Japanese robots had already supplied a better theory. A machine never remains outside the person who operates it. It rearranges the body, distributes responsibility and teaches a new grammar of possible actions. The decisive question is not whether we control the machine. It is which part of us the machine has quietly made indispensable to itself.
Godzilla is the consequence we cannot dismiss. Jeeg is the body converted into infrastructure. Goldrake is the survivor compelled to reuse the instrument of catastrophe. Together, they gave Italian children an education nobody had placed in the schedule: technology remembers what its makers prefer to forget, and the body remembers what language has refused to say.
We thought Japan had sent us robots. It had sent us instructions for living after the end of the world, and a contraband vocabulary for the feelings that survived it. We watched them before dinner, then went to the table when our mothers called, carrying inside us a catastrophe for which Italian television had no adult programme. Perhaps our difficulty was never that we felt too little. Feeling had first reached us wearing armour.
A black-and-white television of the kind we had in Italy at the time.
How to cite: Micozzi, Gabriele. “The Apocalypse Before Dinner: What Japanese Robots Taught Italian Children.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 19 Sept. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/09/19/japanese-robots.
Gabriele Micozzi is an Italian poet, fiction writer and essayist based in the Marche. His work asks what happens when a perfectly functioning structure encounters what it cannot measure. His writing has appeared in Asymptote, ballast, The Intima, ONE ART, The Ecological Citizen and Ta Adesa, and his fiction is forthcoming in Strange Horizons. For thirty years, he has worked within companies, where he learned that the most frightening machine is often one operating exactly as designed. He is completing Your Devils, a collection about systems and their human remainder. Visit his website for more information.
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