Robo Sapiens Japanicus. Robots, gender, family and the Japanese nation by Jennifer Robertson (4.8🌟)

I discovered this book back in 2019 at the AI exhibition at the Barbican centre. I first grabbed the book because of its title. I love everything Japanese and I am always interested in reading about technology, particularly about robots, cyborgs and transhumanism. But then I read the synopsis in the back cover and I almost jumped when I saw that it was an ethnography and a sociocultural study. This is my preferred, if  not favourite, approach to reading about technology.

Anyway, the book did not disappoint. It was a great read. Before reading the book I had always been curious about how the japanese seemed to manage a perfect balance between tradition and culture on one side and modernity on the other.  Two opposites in my mind. I wondered about how the Japanese society could be so open to so much technology everywhere, in real life and in fiction  (books,  anime,  games). Now, after reading Robo Sapiens Japanicus I have a much better idea. 

Robertson explains how the government has been promoting Innovation 25, a plan to modernise Japan adopting even more technology at home including domestic robots. She tracks down the foundations of this plan to events and policies in the 1940s, including the use of Manga characters to disseminate the government's discourse about how Japanese family should be.   Robertson thoroughly analyses the historical and cultural elements, and motivations of the government to promote such a discourse in the present. One of the motivations that got stuck in my head is that the use of robots in households will encourage Japanese women to have babies. Obviously the government is worried about the ageing population and believe women will opt to have a family if they are freed from the burden of domestic work (which can be carried out  by robots). This "solution" seems simplistic to say the least. As Robertson explains, there are sociocultural and historical reasons why women nowadays are refusing to have babies and even marry.

There is much more in this book, embodiment and gender, robot rights, cyborgs, etc. 

I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in technologies from a sociocultural perspective.

The book was published by University of California press in 2018. 192 pages of content plus extensive notes, bibliography and notes.