2022.Oct.26

REPORTS

Report on the 7th B’AI Book Club
Jennifer Robertson, Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation (2017)

On December 21, 2021, the seventh meeting of the B’AI Book Club, a book review event by project members of the B’AI Global Forum, was held. This time, the reviewer was Professor Yuko Itatsu. The author of Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation, Jennifer Robertson, is a researcher on Japan who has crossed over into art history, Asian studies, and anthropology and is also an artist. This book empirically demonstrates that technological development not only creates new values but also reproduces and maintains traditional values which reinforce nostalgic social conventions, such as the Japanese view of family, gender, and the body, by focusing on the development of robots from the first until the third Abe cabinets. For example, it points out the unique context of “Japan,” where the viewpoint of seeking co-existence with robots and treating robots like humans appears from Shintoism and Buddhism.

One point mainly discussed in the latter half of the book was the author’s point that the interest in embodying the commonly accepted “gender sense (view)” (Prof. Itastu’s translation), such as the granting of cultural genitalia as a physical element, is similar to “Miss Japan,” an existence that combines a physical body with a transcendental or abstract body. The author also pointed out the distorted situation in which the robots’ rights are seen as superior to foreign immigrants, as indicated by a survey in which more older people responded that they would prefer to be cared for by robots than by foreign immigrants.

In the discussion session, we discussed issues such as what kind of understanding can be made of the subjectivity of robots in care, what looks like Japan’s unique context can be said to be so, and how the human-like representation of robots should be. Overall, this book review meeting reminded me of the need to consider what cultural and social factors are behind the interest in bringing robots closer to humans rather than uncritically celebrating it.