Why Japan Fears Not the Robot

WHY ARE WE so afraid of robots? It’s not just anxiety about the job-killing potential of creeping automation and the rise of artificial intelligence that makes people fear robots: it’s deeply embedded in Western culture. Yet in Japan, they are adored.

“It’s so much part of their history that they’ve never seen it in the negative light that Westerners see it in,” said Professor Angela Ndalianis, Director of the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia. “It’s a part of their theatre tradition, their art tradition, and very embedded in the community.”

She credits Japan’s long tradition of karakuri, mechanized puppets, and clockwork automatons that became popular in the 17th century — although antecedents date back to the 1420s, when karakuri (meaning ‘mechanism’ or ‘trick’) were used in festival floats where they danced and rang bells. By the 1820s, they were widely used in religious festivals, where they performed re-enactments of traditional myths and legends, and heavily influenced Japanese theatre.

Meanwhile, the West has a long tradition fearing ‘forbidden knowledge’ and the dangers of human hubris, which often lead to the downfall of the great. From Greek myths like Prometheus and Oedipus to the bible, the Judeo-Christian tradition is littered with examples — but it took Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the 19th century to spawn a thousand plotlines in literature and cinema that have given us everything from the rogue replicants in Blade Runner to the domestic servants in I, Robot who ultimately take over human affairs.

Ironically, says Ndalianis, it was the introduction of mechanical clocks by European missionaries in the 16th century that accelerated Japan’s fascination with all things robotic. Karakuri became more intricate, mostly made with whalebone and wood but also metal parts. “But it was always seen as a positive thing because it was a part of the culture,” she says.

Today, Japan abounds with robots: humanoid entertainment bots like Honda’s ASIMO and Sony’s QRIO, animal-like pet robots like Sony’s AIBO, Hanako androids for training dentists, guard robots like Sanyo’s Banryu, or automated wheelchairs like Toyota’s three-wheeled i-REAL personal mobility robot.

It’s no surprise more than half of the world’s industrial robots are in Japan, and that it exports more robots than the next five biggest robot manufacturing nations — Germany, France, Italy, United States, and South Korea — combined.

Robots have also featured in Japanese fiction since the 1930s, with the 1950s bringing the most popular incarnation in Mighty Atom, better known outside Japan as Astro Boy, and Tetsujin-28-Go or Iron Man #28.

Astro Boy was a robotic version of the Pinocchio fable: an android boy with emotions created to replace a dead son; Iron Man #28 centered on the adventures of a young boy who controls a giant robot built by his late father. The latter spawned the ‘giant robot’ genre in anime.

But it’s Japan’s social robots — those designed to interact with humans — that fascinate Ndalianis and offer insights into how we in the West might learn to cope with their growing presence. Most social robots are designed to be cute: either pleasantly humanoid-like Pepper, which talks to seniors in nursing homes and leads in group games and exercises; or they hawk animal characteristics like Paro, the talking, fuzzy baby seal bot.

The most ambitious of these is Toyota’s range of five Partner Robots, humanoids designed to help with chores and offer companionship — a growing need in an aging population where a quarter are over 65, and millions of retirees live alone. Some are bipedal while others have Segway-like wheels.

The most recent is T-HR3, launched in 2017, a humanoid robot capable of flexible movements that mirror the actions of its remote human operator, and of sharing the force exerted by and on the robot with the operator using force feedback. The official mascots of Tokyo’s Summer Olympics, now slated to debut in 2021, will be based on the T-HR3.

“Social robots bring up new challenges that will have profound impacts on humans, some intended and some unintended,” says Ndalianis. “So, there’s a lot we can learn from the Japanese experience. It can show us the relationship people will have with robots in the future.”

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