Robots won’t save Japan: An ethnography of eldercare automation

As rising costs coincide with a shrinking labor force, Japan's rapidly aging population threatens to overstretch the capacities of the elderly care system.The looming care crisis is, as James Wright argues in his monograph Robots Won't Save Japan, not least a crisis of Japanese capitalism itself.Accordingly, the ongoing efforts of the Japanese government to promote robotic care are both an attempt to rationalize old age care and a strategy to "revitalize" the Japanese economy.Far more nuanced than its bold title might suggest, Robots Won't Save Japan is an elegantly structured and beautifully written ethnography that sheds light on the disconnect between the state-promoted vision of robotic care and the intricate everyday realities of care provision.While the book is first and foremost an ethnography of elderly care automation, it also offers a rich account of the institutional context in which this transformation unfolds (or not).Through the lens of care robotics, the book reveals the inner workings of Japan's long-term care insurance system (LTCI) and provides a fresh perspective on the reluctant path towards deregulating labor migration to alleviate the care crisis.More broadly, Wright links the efforts to promote robotic technology -primarily led by the Ministry for Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) -to the persistence of the "productivist nature" of the Japanese welfare state (31), in which industrial policymaking still seems to dominate social policymaking.The structure of the book reflects the objective to connect "the micro and the macro" (17) from different perspectives.In Chapter 2, the author thus first turns to the Robot Innovation Research Center within the National Institute for Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Tsukuba -a leading public research institute for the development of robotic technology, and thus a site in which the interests of the state, the high-tech industry, and academia intersect.Yet, as acknowledged early in the chapter, the Robot Innovation Research Center is also a site that does not lend itself easily to ethnographic research (39), so that the insights into the governance of the research institute or the actual practices of developing and testing robotic devices remain limited.Still, the chapter illustrates well how the institute nurtures an "algorithmic" approach to elderly care that remains far removed from the everyday reality of providing and receiving care -and thus prepares the ground for the following four chapters.Chapters 3 through 6 -based on several months of "deep hanging out" in a fairly typical Japanese care home in the greater Tokyo area before, during and after the introduction of several care robots (16-17) -are the heart of the book.The chapters are set up like an ethnographic experiment: While Chapter 3 provides a detailed account of the care home, its main protagonists (manager, care givers, and patients) and their daily routines, Chapters 4