Robots Won't Save Japan: An Ethnography of Eldercare Automation

by James Wright

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.

Genres: Japan

198 pages, Hardcover

Published February 15, 2023

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

On December 13, 1927, James Arlington Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio. His father worked for fifty years at a glass factory, and his mother left school at fourteen to work in a laundry; neither attended school beyond the eighth grade. While in high school in 1943 Wright suffered a nervous breakdown and missed a year of school. When he graduated in 1946, a year late, he joined the army and was stationed in Japan during the American occupation. He then attended Kenyon College on the G.I. Bill, and studied under John Crowe Ransom. He graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1952, then married another Martins Ferry native, Liberty Kardules. The two traveled to Austria, where, on a Fulbright Fellowship, Wright studied the works of Theodor Storm and Georg Trakl at the University of Vienna. He returned to the U.S. and earned master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Washington, studying with Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz. He went on to teach at The University of Minnesota, Macalester College, and New York City's Hunter College.

Reviews

[Kiki023 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weighed down by superfluous jargon and the typical 21st-century academic practice of describing ordinary experience in obfuscatory vernacular (ironic both in that this distances the anthropologist from his/her subject and because the practice of ethnography is supposed to be situated in the "lived experience" of the everyday common life), but if you can look past the failure to either think or write concisely then this is still an engaging, if narrow, analysis of a problem growing ever more acute. The world is aging. Developed countries are failing to achieve at or above-replacement fertility rates. The consequences are set to be ruinous for the capacity of the world's governments to offer basic services and maintain existing institutions. While much of the intellectual world is still mired in an 80s-era bubble dominated by discourses around "overpopulation", Japan offers a stark example of what the actual future, given current demographic trends, might look like. It's not pretty.

The societal problems of post-asset bubble life in Japan are well known and have been covered in other works. The first-hand impression of our author reaffirms this narrative through a case study of a single Japanese care home. The displacement of the family by the state in elder care, the entry of women into the labor force, and delayed patterns of adulthood and marriage have precipitated a critical labor shortage in the care industry. With cultural restrictions precluding reliance on imported labor, Japan has underwritten an effort to promote robotics and automation in healthcare. The results are mixed and decidedly ambivalent. Humanoids repurposed for care-work have not been adopted en masse, remain expensive to purchase, and require a great deal of oversight to ensure they function properly within the care home. The impression one gets is that promises of imminent roboticization are overhyped and might also be, were it to materialize, unwelcome and degrading to the actual practice of human care. The advent of generative artificial intelligence is not touched upon to a great degree, as this study was completed right before the release of ChatGPT, but it seems likely that new nexus technologies in overlapping sectors like AI and robotics will at once accelerate efforts to automate in areas where there are shortages without doing much to resolve the problem that pushed Japanese culture from a solidaristic/corporatist society to a muen shakai - society without ties - in the first place. Given that the rest of the developed world is now beginning to display similar pathologies, we may look upon the decay of Japan as only the most advanced case in a rapidly spreading sickness whose proposed remedy leaves us even more atomized, disembodied, and alone.