Robots Won T Save Japan

Robots Won't Save Japan addresses the Japanese government's efforts to develop care robots in response to the challenges of an aging population, rising demand for eldercare, and a critical shortage of care workers. Drawing on ethnographic research at key sites of Japanese robot development and implementation, James Wright reveals how such devices are likely to transform the practices, organization, meanings, and ethics of caregiving if implemented at scale. This new form of techno-welfare state that Japan is prototyping involves a reconfiguration of care that deskills and devalues care work and reduces opportunities for human social interaction and relationship building. Moreover, contrary to expectations that care robots will save labor and reduce health care expenditures, robots cost more money and require additional human labor to tend to the machines. As Wright shows, robots alone will not rescue Japan from its care crisis. The attempts to implement robot care instead point to the importance of looking beyond such techno-fixes to consider how to support rather than undermine the human times, spaces, and relationships necessary for sustainably cultivating good care.

While the US sponsors robot-on-robot destruction contests, Japan's feature tasks that mimic non-violent human activities. Why is this? What accounts for Japan's unique relationship with robots as potential colleagues in life, rather than potential adversaries? This book answers this query by looking at Japan's historical connections with robots. Japan stands out for its long love affair with robots, a phenomenon that is creating what will likely be the world's first mass robot culture. While US companies have created robot vacuum cleaners and war machines, Japan has

Japan is attempting to build a new economy. It goes by various names, such as 'Society 5.0', 'sustainable capitalism', and 'new form of capitalism'. It is to be constructed through digital and green transformation, and a 'virtuous cycle of growth and distribution'. The effort faces strong headwinds, including demographic decline and ageing, Japan's external energy dependence and geopolitical turbulence, and the legacies of Japan's 'lost decades'. Nonetheless, since 2015 a path has been identified that steers between Big Tech market oligopoly on the one hand, and an overbearing state on the other. For others facing the same post-neoliberal, sustainability transformation challenges as Japan, this public-private coordinated building effort is noteworthy. Building a New Economy uses an evolutionary conceptual framework of states-and-markets, organizations-and-technology, and institutional change. It shows how the institutional coherence of the manufacturing-centred postwar model broke down, and was followed by the ideological and institutional dissonance of the 'lost decades'. However, new institutional building blocks have been identified and (partially) assembled which could lead Japan towards a new model which is more open and adaptive. These blocks include a reconfigured developmental state, and new forms of coordination with and within the corporate sector, at times encompassing civil society. Importantly, for a country that has favoured social stability over creative destruction, and has struggled with change, the path forward may require 'controlled dis-equilibrium' of institutions rather than tight coherence. 'Society 5.0' and the 'new form of capitalism' claim to be people-centred; making them so will be the crucial challenge.

In a world of globalised media, Japanese popular culture has become a signifi cant fountainhead for images, narrative, artefacts, and identity. From Pikachu, to instantly identifi able manga memes, to the darkness of adult anime, and the hyper- consumerism of product tie- ins, Japan has bequeathed to a globalised world a rich variety of ways to imagine, communicate, and interrogate tradition and change, the self, and the technological future. Within these foci, questions of law have often not been far from the surface: the crime and justice of Astro Boy; the property and contract of Pokémon; the ecological justice of Nausicaä; Shinto’s focus on order and balance; and the anxieties of origins in J- horror. This volume brings together a range of global scholars to refl ect on and critically engage with the place of law and justice in Japan’s popular cultural legacy. It explores not only the global impact of this legacy, but what the images, games, narratives, and artefacts that comprise it reveal about law, humanity, justice, and authority in the twenty-first century.

Japanese Robot Culture examines social robots in Japan, those in public, domestic, and artistic contexts. Unlike other studies, this book sees the robot in relation to Japanese popular culture, and argues that the Japanese ‘affinity’ for robots is the outcome of a complex loop of representation and social expectation in the context of Japan’s continuing struggle with modernity. Considering Japanese robot culture from the critical perspectives afforded by theatre and performance studies, this book is concerned with representations of robots and their inclusion in social and cultural contexts, which science and engineering studies do not address. The robot as a performing object generates meaning in staged events and situations that make sense for its Japanese observers and participants. This book examines how specific modes of encounter with robots in carefully constructed mises en scène can trigger reflexive, culturally specific, and often ideologically-inflected responses.

This book introduces readers to the ethical and goal-oriented functions of touch in professional practice. Touch is both an increasingly visible topic today and a core skill in many professions, especially in health, education and social work. This book combines helpful theoretical discussions and practical information, offering a balanced and culturally-informed introduction to an issue that both students and professionals often find difficult to navigate. Chapters discuss the various functions of touch and its uses, giving readers a deeper understanding of the potential of tactile work practices. The authors offer clear legal and ethical guidance to empower learners. They discuss key issues such as harmful touch and the increasing digitisation of patient work. Activities, case studies and further readings promote learning and help readers reflect on their own relationship to touch. This book will be an invaluable resource for students in undergraduate and graduate courses in healthcare, nursing, education and social work, and to practitioners looking for guidance on this topic.

Japan is arguably the first postindustrial society to embrace the prospect of human-robot coexistence. Over the past decade, Japanese humanoid robots designed for use in homes, hospitals, offices, and schools have become celebrated in mass and social media throughout the world. In Robo sapiens japanicus, Jennifer Robertson casts a critical eye on press releases and public relations videos that misrepresent robots as being as versatile and agile as their science fiction counterparts. An ethnography and sociocultural history of governmental and academic discourse of human-robot relations in Japan, this book explores how actual robots—humanoids, androids, and animaloids—are “imagineered” in ways that reinforce the conventional sex/gender system and political-economic status quo. In addition, Robertson interrogates the notion of human exceptionalism as she considers whether “civil rights” should be granted to robots. Similarly, she juxtaposes how robots and robotic exoskeletons reinforce a conception of the “normal” body with a deconstruction of the much-invoked Theory of the Uncanny Valley.

Introduction to the Japanese robot industry; current trends in robot popularization & future development of robots. This is the English version of a Japanese report, 'Long-Term Demand Forecast of Industrial Robots', issued by JIRA.