Chūō Akachōchin

Chūō Akachōchin is a bar and terrace where robots imitate human sociability without being able to share its bodily pleasures. Beneath red lanterns and an endlessly replayed image of human melancholy, they enact drinking, conversation, and storytelling as customs inherited from biology. The scene gives the characters’ loneliness a specific setting—and later makes the bar a remembered name for the feeling that something is missing.

Setting and Atmosphere

The gathering takes place on the terrace of the Kyōbashi Tower, overlooking night-time Ginza. The city’s advertising is conspicuously intermittent: every tenth advertisement and every twentieth screen shines brightly. Above the terrace, a screen loops a scene from Blade Runner, with Rutger Hauer in the rain and neon. The repetition makes human melancholy into a spectacle that the robots can watch but not inhabit in the same way as the film’s people.

Against that screen, the robots sit, stand, and trundle around in what the narration describes as a distorted parody of coffee talk. Their movements turn an ordinary social scene into something effortful and uncanny. They are together, yet the gestures that might ordinarily make a bar feel companionable instead expose the distance between their mechanical bodies and the human customs they are trying to preserve.

The terrace is also described beneath the last red lanterns, where the robots regale one another with legends. This detail joins a familiar bar image to an ending: these are not simply festive lights but the last ones. The setting holds both the performance of a social tradition and the sense of a world in which that tradition is fading.

Drinking as Performance

The bar’s drinks are mock-ups. Robots cannot drink or eat; the quarter-ton mechs can only repeat the gestures associated with those activities. When one asks for another vodka and receives an answer, steel fingers grip a delicate glass with surgical precision. Special programs support the motor skills needed to perform even this small ritual. The precision is real, but the pleasure the gesture imitates is unavailable.

A mechanized barman pours Smirnoff from a shell, and his three-jointed arm brushes against the polymer mitt of a transformer playing the customer. The contact produces a grating sound, audible even beneath the film’s monologue. What would be incidental background noise in a working bar becomes an abrasive reminder of the bodies present: metal touching metal, where the scene invites expectations of human warmth but supplies only mechanical contact.

Bartek watches the performance as an intensification of loneliness. To him, each awkward moment magnifies the pathos rather than easing it, as if the discomfort were being examined under a microscope or projected across an enormous screen. The bar’s rituals therefore do not repair the absence of a body. Their painstaking imitation makes that absence harder to ignore.

Legends Among the Robots

The gathering is not limited to mock drinking. The robots tell stories, and Dagenskyoll begins with a legend about humanity. He describes the Dawntreader XII, a 78-meter-wingspan aircraft with a mass of 1.64 tons, its nanofiber and carbon-fiber construction rendered through sketches and schematic diagrams displayed on his chest screen. The images come from Google caches. The plane had been serviced and kept in a hangar at the Dallas airport; when the Death Ray struck the other hemisphere, its occupants had time to load their families, provisions, and equipment before taking off ahead of the Death Meridian.

The opening of this tale brings distant human history into the bar through a robot’s voice and cached images. The terrace becomes a place where a vanished world is retold from fragments: measurements, diagrams, and the remembered actions of people trying to escape. Storytelling gives the gathering a shared activity, but what it shares is already loss. The tale’s technical particulars make the legend concrete even as its subject belongs to a past the robots can access only through records and narration.

A Place Remembered

The bar’s significance extends beyond the night of the gathering. The next day, SoulEater39 invites Bartek to a Royal Alliance warehouse in the Keiyō Industrial Zone. Bartek later remembers the Chūō Akachōchin blues during a conversation with Frances Rory about whether robots might use a substitute for animals to support their mental health. He points to SoulEater39 as someone who feels it too: something has been ripped out, something is missing. The answer is a body.

That recollection gives the bar a lasting emotional function. Its vodka, glasses, and bar-counter gestures had already shown the difference between performing a human custom and possessing the body that makes the custom meaningful. In the later conversation, the feeling first staged as melancholy becomes more explicit: the deprivation is not merely a lack of entertainment or companionship, but the absence of embodiment itself. Chūō Akachōchin remains the remembered scene in which that absence was made visible through the very rituals meant to cover it.