Review: Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation by Jennifer Robertson
Jennifer Robertson
Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation
Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 2018. 280pp
ISBN: 978-0-520-28320-6
Robots have been “good to think” regarding human futures. As seen in media, films, and science fiction novels, robots, in their tenuous position on the threshold of human/ non-human render legible for thought the future life and relations of human, non-human, and quasi-human being. In Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation, Jennifer Robertson examines how people imagine the future and consider the past and present of a society through the lens of robots in Japan. A robot is not merely a technological device to facilitate human life, but also a sociocultural prism where people discuss current social agendas, imagine different social futures, and enact new ways of being. Robertson explores “the rhetorical climate” of Japanese society as one that comprehends the coexistence of human and robots (31). In this rhetoric, robots are no longer acultural and ahistorical machinery. As the title Robo Sapiens Japanicus implies, robots in Japan are constructed and recognized as culturally intertwined being of Japanese society.
Robertson explores multifaceted aspects of Japanese society through the sociocultural phenomena and discourses surrounding robots and the robot industry. She sheds light on how existing social concepts of family, gender, nation state, citizenship, and disability are sustained, reproduced, and at times contested by the discourse regarding robots. Robertson argues that the narratives surrounding robots are constructed in ways that bolster conventional ideas of family and gender. She juxtaposes two fictive ethnographies, Yamato Family and Innovation 25, which play on themes of the family within the pre-war era and the high-tech future respectively. When read collectively, both works suggest that nationalisms enacted through nostalgia for pre-war Japan work through traditional concepts of family. Innovation 25 insinuates that “technological colonialism” substitutes (or supplements) militaristic intervention of pre-war Japanese society by being upheld by family which is a rudimentary units of social organization. Moreover, robot-surveilled futures, justified in the name of security, safety, and convenience facilitate the normalization of invasions of individual privacy. What is “safe” and “secure” is not challenged or questioned here. Furthermore, the narrative of Innovation 25 reinforces conventional gender roles of Japanese families. According to Innovation 25, even almost after 100 years, those who are in charge of household chores are still women. In addition to this, robots reproduce conventional social norms by embodying and representing particular gendered features. The robot companies do not simply inculcate sexist ideology into robots’ bodies, but also reproduce “a sexist division of gendered labor” in Japanese society (82). Roboticists naturalize and universalize specific gendered attributes.
Robertson also outlines how roboticists and robot companies reproduce xenophobic discourses that construct a rigid binary between a Japanese “us” and a non-Japanese “them.” Robots are ‘harmless’ friends for Japanese and they are conceived as apparatuses where Japanese people realize and extend the ‘ideal’ of ethnic homogeneity. Unlike ethnic minorities in Japan, the state bestows robots citizenship and rights. They receive such privileges because they are mobilized to reinforce conventional norms regarding the family, kinship, and ethno-national homogeneity. Robertson shows how the Japanese state’s generous treatment of robots as compared to ethnic minorities is a lens through which to understand larger questions of national membership in Japan.
Finally, Robertson speaks to how robot production extends from a pervasive logic of ableism. She emphasizes that the design of the robotic body and exoskeleton endorse what she calls “cyber-ableism” that excludes those who do not fit the ideal body. Despite the opportunity and potential which robotic exoskeletons provides to the disabled in Japan, they are ironic extensions of an ableist vision of the world. Robertson argues that this kind of presumption which excludes members of society and sustains the epistemological hierarchy among the members are being reproduced by the production and consumption of robots without being questioned.
Through rigorous multi-sited ethnographic work, Robertson succeeds in covering multiple sites, narratives, and actors involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of robots. She creates a compelling portrayal of the multifaceted social agendas that converge on social debates about robots. By exploring robots and the surrounding discourses, she diagnoses and problematizes the existing social issues with respect to sociocultural minorities. She claims that the discourses regarding coexistence with robots in effect bolster the traditional notions of family, gender, nationalism, disability, and citizenship. The desire to coexist with robots and integrate them into daily life speaks to larger social anxieties. Robertson allows the readers to consider that seemingly ‘neutral’ technological production is culturally inflected. Robots are mere reflections of what roboticists, robot designers, marketers, government, and consumers want them to be. What all these actors want robots to be does not stand out politics or culture. The spheres of technology and culture are not independent and separate, but rather interdependent.
Robertson’s brilliant ethnographic work suffers at points in its reliance on essentialized notions of Japanese society and culture. She depends on reified categories like “the Japanese state,” and the “Japanese people,” as if these weren’t cultural contested constructions. Further, her analysis could benefit from more specificity regarding the specific agents who (re)produce the dominant discourses she critiques? Is the discourse of robots we discussed with the book a dominant one? What agents does she overlook? Even though the government generates and leads the conventional gender-biased discourses, what are the competing ideas about gender, the family, and ethnic minorities produced by diversely positioned social actors? For instance, some animation films dealing with robot issues, such as Vanguard, suggest a liberated robotic future over conservative society. While robot-talk may be an avenue for reproducing existing values, it also serves as a locus where people dream and imagine different futures.
[Bibliography]
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 1963, Totemism, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Robertson, Jennifer, 2018, Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation, Oakland, CA: University of California Press.