Japan’s mechanical dolls, or karakuri ningyo, are said to have come from China. The Edo period (1603-1867) brought development of a true clockwork-doll culture, spurred by the Takeda-za, a mechanical-puppet theater founded in 1662 in Osaka’s Dotonbori district.

Diagrams for a tea-serving doll, archetype of the clockwork figures that were Japan’s earliest robots, can be found in Karakuri Zui (Illustrated Miscellany of Automata) written by Hanzo Yorinao Hosokawa in 1796. This book is an early guide to mechanical devices. In its pages the late Masanori Takashina (the seventh doll artisan to inherit the name Tamaya Shobei) found the instructions he needed to recreate the wondrous tea-serving doll. We asked Shoji Takashina, the ninth and current Tamaya Shobei, for a demonstration and some inside information on clockwork dolls. He invited us up to the roof of the Aichi Pavilion in the Nagakute area of the World Expo.

http://int.kateigaho.com/spr05/robots.html

In general, the “Renaissance” is a very limiting time period for clockpunk, because many of the mechanical innovations that make it possible were in fact invented centuries earlier by Arabic/Muslim engineers and were only translated into European languages following the fall of Andalucia, Muslim Spain, in the decades preceeding 1492 CE. In general they made vast advances in gear technology, precision crafting, clockworks, and the study of water pressure and fluid dynamics, not to mention optics, medicine, astronomy and mathematics that became the basis for everything the Europeans did later once translations into Latin became available to them.