A joystick teaching system using a fuzzy compliance control is presented for polishing robots. The joystick is regarded as a virtual spring-damper system, so that the joystick's compliance in operation can be easily adjusted according to the friction force acting between the polishing tool and the workpiece. In conventional compliance control, both the damping coefficient and the stiffness coefficient are generally selected to be suitable for each task by trial and error. Our proposed method described suitably generates the component of stiffness by a simple fuzzy reasoning method. The effectiveness of the proposed system has been examined by some teaching experiments using an industrial robot FS-20 with a PC based controller.