Welcome to the Hotel Automata

At Henn-na, you can check in with a dinosaur. (Credit: Bobbie van der List) The train ride from Nagasaki to the Huis Ten Bosch theme park in Japan takes about two hours. Along the way, I pass rice paddies and sleepy towns; this is not the place you’d expect to find the country’s first hotel staffed by robots. When I arrive at the Huis Ten Bosch station, I’m surrounded by iconic Dutch architecture and buildings. The theme park was designed to give people in Japan a taste of Europe. I take a shuttle bus to robot hotel Henn-na, located minutes from the theme park gates. Beside the hotel entrance, stands a Transformers-like robot, twice my size, which doesn’t seem to have any practical purpose whatsoever.