When Sony released a robotic dog called AIBO in Tokyo in May of 1999, the first batch of 3,000 units sold out online in 20 minutes — and today, more than 800 of those same AIBOs have been given traditional Buddhist funerals at a 450-year-old temple in Chiba Prefecture, where a priest chants sutras for the peaceful transition of their souls

Approximately 26 years after the small dog-shaped robots went on sale, the ones that stopped working are being given Buddhist funerals at a rural temple in Chiba Prefecture. The specific sequence of events that produced this outcome is one that essentially none of the Sony product managers who launched the AIBO in June 1999 had anticipated as a plausible eventual disposition of their consumer robotics product line. The AIBO was, by the standards of contemporary 1999 consumer robotics, an unusually sophisticated product. It weighed approximately 1.4 kilograms, moved on four articulated legs, contained a substantial suite of touch, sound, and image sensors, and ran an adaptive learning algorithm that Sony had explicitly designed to produce individualised behavioural patterns for each specific robot based on the specific interactions its human owner engaged in with it across the robot’s operational lifetime. Two AIBOs of the same manufacturing batch, exposed to different owners and different domestic environments across their first several months of operation, would develop measurably different response patterns to identical stimuli — a design feature that Sony’s product literature described in the specific language of “personality development” and that a substantial fraction of the eventual AIBO owner community would come to interpret in essentially non-metaphorical terms.

The specific consumer market for the AIBO across the seven years of its 1999-2006 production run was, by contemporary Sony sales expectations, substantially smaller than the company had initially projected. As detailed in National Geographic’s coverage of the AIBO robot dogs given Buddhist funerals in Japan, Sony produced approximately 150,000 AIBO units across the seven years, across six major model iterations (the ERS-110/111 first generation of 1999, the ERS-210 of 2000, the ERS-220 sci-fi styled variant of 2001, the ERS-311 small model of 2002, the ERS-7 dog-like model of 2003, and a small number of specialised sub-variants) — approximately one-tenth of the volumes Sony had projected in its original 1999 launch business case. The product never became a mass-market consumer category and was discontinued on 26 January 2006 as part of the broader Sony corporate restructuring that eliminated the entire consumer robotics division. Sony continued to provide repair services for existing AIBOs at a specialised “clinic” facility for approximately eight years after the 2006 production discontinuation. On 31 March 2014, the AIBO repair clinic was permanently closed.

What happened after 2014

The specific consequence of Sony’s 2014 decision to end AIBO repair services was that approximately 150,000 privately-owned Japanese AIBOs — some of which had by that point been in continuous domestic operation for as long as 15 years — became substantially unrepairable through official channels. As reported in the International Society of Zooanthropology’s academic analysis of AIBO funerals and the anthropological questions they raise about human relationships with artificial companions, the specific mechanism by which the informal AIBO restoration economy subsequently emerged was the specific initiative of a former Sony engineer named Nobuyuki Norimatsu, who founded a specialised vintage-electronics repair company called A FUN in 2014 with the explicit business model of repairing AIBOs using cannibalised parts from other AIBOs whose owners had decided to donate their non-functional robots as parts sources for other owners’ restoration attempts. A FUN has, across the subsequent 11 years, repaired approximately 2,000 AIBOs using this donor-based restoration model. The specific ethical problem the model produced — that A FUN needed to physically disassemble one AIBO in order to salvage the specific components required to repair another — was one that a substantial fraction of the AIBO donor community, and Norimatsu himself, considered substantially non-trivial.

The specific institutional response A FUN developed to the ethical problem of AIBO disassembly was to arrange, in 2015, a formal Buddhist funeral ceremony for the donor AIBOs before they were dismantled for parts. The specific temple that A FUN approached was Kōfuku-ji (光福寺, not to be confused with the substantially more famous 7th-century Kōfuku-ji at Nara), a small rural Buddhist temple in the town of Isumi in Chiba Prefecture approximately 90 kilometres east of central Tokyo, founded during the Sengoku warring-states period in approximately 1573 and continuously operating in the same rural location for the subsequent 450 years. The head priest of Kōfuku-ji, a Buddhist monk named Bungen Oi, agreed to conduct the ceremonies on the specific theological reasoning that Japanese Buddhist tradition has, for approximately 1,400 years, recognised the doctrine of sōmoku-jōbutsu (草木成仏) — the specific concept that not merely sentient beings but also the substantially inanimate objects of the material world (grasses, trees, tools, mechanical devices) possess Buddha-nature and are therefore appropriate subjects of Buddhist funerary observance. Kōfuku-ji conducted its first AIBO funeral in 2015 for 17 decommissioned robots. The service has been conducted approximately annually since.

What the ceremonies actually involve

The specific ritual structure of the AIBO funerals at Kōfuku-ji is, per the accumulated media coverage of the ceremonies across the 2015-2023 period, substantially identical to the standard Japanese Buddhist funerary rituals conducted for human decedents. As described in Agence France-Presse’s coverage of a 2018 AIBO funeral ceremony at Kōfuku-ji, the ceremonies involve the ritual placement of the AIBOs on a formal Buddhist altar arranged with incense, candles, and traditional Buddhist decorations (with the traditional fruit offerings replaced, in a specific liturgical adaptation, by the pliers, wire clippers, and circuit testers appropriate to the ritual subjects being honoured); the recitation of Buddhist sutras by the presiding priest for the peaceful transition of the departed AIBOs’ spirits into whatever posthumous state Buddhist metaphysics considers appropriate to formerly-functional consumer electronics products; and the reading of letters and prayer notes that the AIBOs’ original owners have attached to their donated robots. Sample owner notes recorded by journalists have included: “Please help other AIBOs. Tears rose in my eyes when I decided to say goodbye” and “I feel relieved to know there will be a prayer for my AIBO.” Approximately 800 AIBOs have received Kōfuku-ji funerals across the 2015-2023 period.

As reported in Buddhistdoor Global’s coverage of the Japanese Buddhist funerals for robot dogs, the priest Bungen Oi has repeatedly told journalists who visit Kōfuku-ji that he does not consider the ceremonies absurd. “All things have a bit of soul,” he has stated on multiple occasions. “Even though AIBO is a machine and doesn’t have feelings, it acts as a mirror for human emotions.” The specific Japanese Buddhist tradition of holding memorial services for used inanimate objects that have provided sustained service to human owners — including hari-kuyō (needle memorial services, conducted at Japanese Buddhist temples since approximately the Heian period (794-1185) for sewing needles that have broken after long service, with Chinese antecedents dating substantially earlier) and ningyō-kuyō (doll memorial services, conducted since approximately the same Heian period for dolls that human owners are ready to discard) — provides the substantive institutional precedent that Kōfuku-ji’s AIBO funerals extend into the specific product category of late-20th-century consumer robotics. The 3,000 AIBOs that Japanese consumers ordered from Sony in the 20 minutes following the 1 June 1999 online launch are, in essential respects, still being ritually honoured 26 years later — in a country in which the substantial majority of the human population maintains no formal religious affiliation, at a rural temple whose primary institutional function across the preceding 4.5 centuries has been the funerary observance of other things that used to be alive.