Japanese care centers have seen an increasing reliance on robotic assistance in service and social-care tasks, which poses questions about ethics, governance, and caregiving practices. This article addresses the concept of robotics as a media technology, and the role of human agency in shaping imagination as an interpretive framework as it reflects on two specific points of debate; (1) whether the humanoid robot Pepper, deployed in an elder-care nursing home in Japan, has some form of agency in its interaction with a nursing home resident; and (2) whether appropriate anthropological debates about being (properly reframed with regard to difference) provide insight into the reality of robot care. Adapting an approach by anthropologist Boellstorff (2016), whose work focuses on the reality of virtual worlds, this article analyzes whether questions regarding the real of robot care are questions of being, i.e. of ontology. Conflating the interhuman with the real and the robotic with the unreal—or, in this case, conflating human care with the real (authentic) and robot care with the unreal (artificial)—can negatively affect our ability to discuss the reality of the robotic. The ontological turn can yield important insights, but its potential is lost if what is real is preassigned to the physical.
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Japan has both the highest life expectancy among the world’s nation states and the world’s proportionally largest population of older people (Cabinet Office Citation2020). Concurrently, since 1990, Japan has seen a rapidly declining birth rate, leading to a shrinking workforce, a growing number of elderly people, and a decreasing number of caregivers. Caregiving has long been the social expectation of women in Japan, who often face a choice between pursuing careers and fulfilling familial obligations, including caring for aging parents, in-laws, or spouses. As women increasingly pursue professional careers, conventional gender roles and traditional expressions of femininity have been upended (Cabinet Office Citation2016, Citation2020; Ho Citation2018; Nemoto Citation2016; Ogasawara Citation2016; Roberts Citation2011). A significant influx of women into the workforce and changes in the nature of the jobs they perform have led to growing concerns about how women can balance professional careers with family duties, including caring for children and aging family members, in the absence of any discussion regarding the changing familial duties of Japanese men. Thus, in addition to declining birth rates and increased longevity, the changing roles of women is a contributing factor to the country’s ongoing elder-care crisis, as the responsibility of care falls primarily on women while Japanese men generally do not face such burden.Footnote1
