Japan is arguably the first postindustrial society to embrace the prospect of human-robot coexistence. Over the past decade, Japanese humanoid robots designed for use in homes, hospitals, offices, and schools have become celebrated in mass and social media throughout the world. In Robo sapiens japanicus, Jennifer Robertson casts a critical eye on press releases and public relations videos that misrepresent robots as being as versatile and agile as their science fiction counterparts. An ethnography and sociocultural history of governmental and academic discourse of human-robot relations in Japan, this book explores how actual robots—humanoids, androids, and animaloids—are “imagineered” in ways that reinforce the conventional sex/gender system and political-economic status quo. In addition, Robertson interrogates the notion of human exceptionalism as she considers whether “civil rights” should be granted to robots. Similarly, she juxtaposes how robots and robotic exoskeletons reinforce a conception of the “normal” body with a deconstruction of the much-invoked Theory of the Uncanny Valley.

About the Author

Jennifer Robertson is Professor of Anthropology and the History of Art at the University of Michigan. She is author of Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan and Native and Newcomer: Making and Remaking a Japanese City.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Author’s Notes

1. Robot Visions
2. Innovation as Renovation
3. Families of Future Past
4. Embodiment and Gender
5. Robot Rights vs. Human Rights
6. Cyborg-Ableism beyond the Uncanny (Valley)
7. Robot Reality Check

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"Jennifer Robertson’s engaging and insightful book Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family and the Japanese Nation is one of the first scholarly works to examine the social and cultural implications of robotics in Japan. . . . Robertson’s book breaks new ground by putting the field of Japanese robotics technology into conversation with social scientific scholarship on gender, nationalism, and disability. The book will be of great interest to researchers working in these fields and will surely stimulate further work on the culture of robotics. Robertson is a gifted writer whose prose is fluid and free of jargon. Advanced undergraduate students and graduate students will encounter little difficulty in making their way through the text. They and other readers will be well rewarded for doing so."
— Social Science Japan

"At a time when mainstream English-language media tends to uncritically buy into the Japanese government/corporate vision of a utopian robot future, Robertson’s thoroughly researched and insightful dismantling of the myths and propaganda surrounding Japanese robots is incredibly valuable."
— Japanese Studies

"Anyone with even a passing interest in robotics in Japan would naturally enjoy this book, but the benefit of its insights extends to all those interested in the workings of contemporary Japan."
— Journal of Japanese Studies

"This book is a vital contribution to the history and anthropology of robotics and offers insightful critiques of gendered and ableist assumptions underlying robot designs past and present."
— Technology and Culture

"What is the nature of robotics in Japan? Robertson deftly shows readers that the anxieties about artificiality, doubling, and identity that haunt the figure of the robot in the so-called West do not animate robotics in Japan. Rather, robots are posed as immanent to a nature already artificial—even as Robertson also demonstrates that robots are cultural platforms for considering and contesting the shifting politics of gender, generation, and labor. A necessary read for anyone interested in past, present, and future of robotics."—Stefan Helmreich, author of Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World

"This book is a highly original, superbly researched, and gracefully executed account of robo sapiens japanicus: how robots are developed, acculturated, promoted, and used in Japan. It remains cool-headed when dissecting the sociopolitical undercurrents of robot policy and provides a crisp analysis as much of Japanese society and politics as of the new 'citizens' in the process of creation."—Sabine Frühstück, author of Playing War Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan

"This is a definite must-read on the '21st century’s newest must-study subject' (Boston Globe). Presenting carefully documented analyses of the cultural imaginaries, the visions, and the realities of Japanese robotics policies, Robertson for the first time unveils the multidimensionality of social robotics as a tool of cultural engineering and value politics. Profoundly instructive for anyone thinking about the ‘robot revolution’."—Johanna Seibt, Research Unit for Robophilosophy, Aarhus University

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews