Robo sapiens japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation by Jennifer Robertson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Robo sapiens japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation by Jennifer Robertson Rodrigo Ochigame (bio) Robo sapiens japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation By Jennifer Robertson. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. 260. "Robotics" is a notoriously difficult field to define and delimit. The word "robot" has highly specific connotations in popular culture, shaped by science fiction ever since Czech writers Karel and Josef Čapek coined it in their 1920 play to describe artificial humans serving as tireless workers. Robotics is also a broad field of professional research and development in academic, commercial, and military institutions. It encompasses such a wide range of products, from Mars rovers to kitchen appliances, that it is almost impossible to specify what distinguishes them from many other machines. [End Page 591] This tension between popular and professional, broad and specific understandings is central to Jennifer Robertson's anthropological study of robotics in Japan, Robo sapiens japanicus. The book focuses on humanoid—and, to a lesser extent, animaloid—robots, particularly those designed to interact with humans in everyday life, for example in households, retail stores, and religious temples. As Robertson acknowledges, such robots hardly represent the larger field of robotics, only accounting for a small fraction of research and development. The industrial and military robots dominating most investments are neither humanoid nor designed for interaction with nonspecialist users. Nevertheless, studying the subfield of humanoid robotics helps us understand the wider field, especially as it operates in Japan. Humanoids play an oversized role in the marketing and popular representation of robotics. In Japan, this is not merely thanks to public relations tactics but largely reflects engineers' priorities. The author argues that humanoid robotics is more significant for Japanese engineers than for their counterparts in the United States and elsewhere. Unlike in the United States, where most research is funded by the military, robotics in Japan is oriented toward a civilian consumer market despite the state's recent attempts to reinterpret its "peace" constitution and create a military market for robotics. Importantly, Robertson is interested in how robots' design reflects cultural anxieties and visions of the future in contemporary Japan. She demonstrates convincingly that robots are imagined as solutions to perceived social problems, such as population aging, labor shortages, declining marriage and fertility rates, and also as preserving the patriarchal extended family, particularly by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's nationalist government. The author conducted fieldwork and archival research between 2006 and 2017, coinciding roughly with the two Abe administrations. She offers critical readings of official documents, including a peculiar "fictional ethnography" written by government policy-makers, which depicts a heteronormative family with a male-gendered humanoid robot. This fictive future family illustrates the "coexistence" of humans and robots. To show how Japan embraces human-robot coexistence, Robertson points not only to public discourse but also to the adoption of robots for providing care, companionship, and entertainment. She contrasts this with the more common vision of human-robot "convergence" in the United States and Europe (like anxieties about technological unemployment or "singularity"). Her articulation of Japan's cultural particularities is generally careful and compelling. For instance, Robertson skillfully guides readers through Japanese conceptions of "nature" (shizen), which animate robots as "living things" in the Shintō universe. She also demystifies the theory of the "uncanny valley," explaining how most interpretations have diverged from Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori's original 1970 formulation. However, the analysis sometimes rests on less convincing depictions of Japanese cultural differences, such as the "mostly favorable acceptance [End Page 592] among Japanese of things mechanical, including robots, from the 1920s onward," and the claim that "the general trend in Japanese popular media and culture has been to characterize robots as benign and human-friendly" even before the 1960s (p. 5). The author mentions only a few examples, centering on the cartoon series Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy), and draws sharp contrasts with American and European works. But her selections are not necessarily representative. The author could have just as easily picked dystopian representations of robots in Japanese media, like some of Unno Jūza's 1930s science fiction novels. Euro-American representations of benign and friendly robots are similarly abundant. Overall...