Title: What We Might Learn from Doraemon, the Robot Cat from the
Future, about How Japan’s Elderly and Their Human Caregivers Will Live with
Emotional Care Robots.
Introduction
Japan leads the world in robotics, both production and socially assistive
robots (SARs). As well, Japan leads the world in aging: in longevity for women,
elderly fraction of the population and rate of increase. While immense literatures
separately examine robots and aging in Japan, SARs are not yet routinely serving
Japan’s elderly. SARs are evidently on their way, but outlooks on their prospects
vary. Media reportage of pilot projects such as Softbank’s “human-like” robot
Pepper is uniformly sunny, while Sherry Turkle has now come to expect only
disappointing simulacra of intimacy from intelligent personal technology.
‘Human-like’ robot “Pepper” here
Can we glimpse possibilities for the use and reaction to SARs for the elderly
in Japan before this nascent technology becomes “rapidly mundane?” This may
happen sooner than we think. Japan’s ambitious National Robot Strategy was just
unveiled on January 23. Japanese Prime Minister Abe then declared 2015 to be
“year one (gannen) of moving towards a “robot society.” The Japanese authorities
want especially to expand the use of robots in such labor-intensive industries as
elderly care. Policymakers aim at expanding the elder-care robotics market to YEN
50 billion by 2020. Japanese workers employed in nursing the elderly totaled half a
million in 2000, a figure that increased to one and a half million by 2012.
Employment in this field will reach one and three-quarters million this year, with a
further increase to roughly two and a half million by 2025. These numbers imply
great stress on tight labor markets as well as on the workers themselves.
Paro here
So far, the effects and effectiveness of SARs in elderly care have not been
demonstrated. Most research is done in Japan, with a limited set of robots - mostly
Paro and AIBO - , and not yet clearly embedded in routine elder-care situations.
The important pioneer work of researchers and caregivers involved in this new
field emphasizes its exploratory nature, but it would seem that the field is still wide
open to think about what a socially assistive robot good with the elderly might be
like.
Wu and colleagues’ unwittingly invite us to consider Doraemon in all his
aspects as a candidate. Their focus groups found Paro charming and attractive.
However, when the moderator told them about its interaction capacities, a
participant said: “But this is not a genuine interaction.” She concluded later on:
“To communicate with Paro is to communicate with nothing.” The phenomenal
popularity of the Doraemon cartoon gives us a window into what a robot that is
good with children and their parents might be like, and from this, we might further
extend our imaginations disciplined by method to reflect on the extent to which a
robot like Doraemon might be good with people in that second childhood we never
outgrow.
Doraemon and kids here
Structural analysis of one of Japan’s most popular and enduring works of the
imagination, the children’s animated TV series ‘Doraemon’, opens a window onto
a bit of the 22nd century pushed into the 20th. In their discussion of the ethics of
robot care for the elderly, Sharkey and Sharkey think that robots might, among
other things, “assist the elderly, and their caregivers in daily tasks; help monitor
their behavior and health; and provide companionship.” Doraemon, the earless
blue robot cat sent here from the 22nd century “is not a pet,” Odel and LaBlanc
assure us, “but a helper and companion.”
Doraemon
In March 2008 Japan's Foreign Ministry appointed Doraemon as the nation's
first "anime ambassador." 2014 was the TV show’s 35th anniversary, based on a
cartoon introduced in magazine form in 1969.
Doraemon 1 here
Since 1979 one fifteen minute episode has been broadcast nightly at 6:45,
just before the evening news. One Saturday evening in 2004 while living in Japan,
I stumbled across the Doraemon 25th Anniversary Special and ended up watching
four full hours of Doraemon cartoons, 16 in all. By a fate mysterious and deep,
Doraemon and I will share a common birth month and day, Sept. 3, when he is
finally manufactured in 2112, a palindromic year.
My major analytic technique is a modified version of structural analysis I
have so far applied only to actual Japanese behavior. This technique understands
symbols as public patterns for action based on structured and interested local
knowledge, rather than as embodied loci of encoded, disinterested meanings, a
cognitive rather than semiotic approach. Claude Levi-Strauss, author of The
Structural Analysis of Myth (by the way celebrating its 60th anniversary in 2015),
and Fujimoto Hiroshi, creator of Doraemon, are two giants of the 20th century who
form a gestalt on the same Mobius strip. “When a manga hero becomes a success,
the manga suddenly stops being interesting,” said Fujimoto. “So the hero has to be
like the stripes on a barber pole; he seems to keep moving upward, but actually he
stays in the same place.” And from Levi-Strauss we learn that
…a myth exhibits a “slated” structure which seeps to the surface, if
one may say so, through the repetition process. However, the slates are not
identical. And since the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model
capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it
happens, the contradiction is real), a theoretically infinite number of slates
will be generated, each one slightly different from the others. Thus, myth
grows spiral-wise until the intellectual impulse which has originated it is
exhausted.
One thousand eight hundred and seventy eight 15 minute TV episode
“slates” and over 50 full-length movies have evidently not exhausted the impulse
that moves Japanese children and now their parents who themselves once watched
as children, to cease attending to Doraemon and Nobita’s mythic barber pole.
Episode plots are formulaic. Nobita, a ten-year-old boy and the central character
of the cartoon, has a problem. He implores Doraemon to fish a gadget from the
future out of his pouch to solve it. Doraemon resists but finally yields. At first the
gadget does seem to solve the problem, but then unintended and unforeseen
consequences emerge, making matters worse, but also funny. Nobita seems to
have learned his lesson, but the next episode reveals that he has not. Wash, rinse,
repeat as needed. Here is a synopsis one story:
“Let’s build a subway”
Nobita, Doraemon and Mama are downtown walking and Nobita is
complaining about it. They near Papa’s office. Papa comes out and is surprised to
see them. The family takes a crowded bus home. Papa is used to it but Nobita and
Doraemon find it exhausting and complain.
Papa’s birthday is coming up soon and Nobita wants to think of some way
Papa won’t have to ride the crowded bus. He tells Doraemon he will give Papa his
own private subway for a birthday present. Doraemon is overwhelmed, but Nobita
really wants him to do it. Doraemon is flattered that Nobita has so much
confidence in him and his tools, and so produces a digging machine that is like a
small submarine with treads and a big screw tip on its front end. The two of them
get in it and immediately start digging into the back yard. They get lost and come
out in the ocean.
They keep trying. The digging machine is evidently hard to direct: it
wanders around under the earth like a drunken mole as the calendar pages flutter
down across the screen. They come out in a women’s public bath, in the lion cage
at the zoo, in a prison exercise yard. More days pass and Papa’s birthday gets
closer, but still no personal subway for him. Now the earth below their house looks
like an ant farm or Swiss cheese.
At last Doraemon believes he has the right map. And away they go once
again. But then they strike a really hard area. They get out and think they hear
digging nearby, but conclude that that it’s only their imagination. Act 2 finishes
with Nobita telling Papa just as they are all turning in for the night, “You’ll really
like your birthday tomorrow, Papa. So good night.” It seems they must have
pulled it off in time.
Act 3 begins with Papa waking to a present beside his futon. In the
box is a subway commuter pass for the “Nobita Private Subway,” good for the
“home to office” ride. After breakfast Nobita and Doraemon take Papa into a hole
in the back yard and Mama comes too. Sure enough, there is one subway car
there; Doraemon is the driver and Nobita is the conductor. “Itte kimasu” from
Papa, “itte ‘rasshai” from Mama and off they go, Papa sprawled out on the seat,
dozing. As they ride along Nobita and Doraemon cheer for how fine their subway
is.
But then they see a light up ahead in their tunnel and slam on the
emergency brakes. They stop just in time to avoid colliding with a real
construction crew putting in a real subway. Nobita claims that the tunnel is his,
and the crew chief accuses him of selfishness, when there are lots and lots of
people who need to ride a public subway. Doraemon agrees with the crew chief.
So they try another route with their digger, but it stalls and Papa has to start
digging with a pick. Papa realizes this is impossible and Nobita weeps bitter tears
of apology. Doraemon too cries and apologies to Papa. Papa forgives them,
recognizing that they meant well. Doraemon then spots a thin crack of light, thru
which they break into the sewer directly below Papa’s office and he arrives at work
on time, not much the worse for wear. The end.
Analysis yields the paradigmatic structure
Doraemon’s gadgets : Nobita’s problems :: Doraemon : Nobita.
Paradigmatic Structure here
The minor contradiction of the stories focuses on the way the gadgetry Doraemon
pulls from his pouch both solves and fails to solve the endless problems Nobita
suffers. The major contradiction, however, goes about its business incognito.
How shall we characterize the enduring relationship between Doraemon and
Nobita? Doraemon has been sent back to the present by Nobita’s dissatisfied
descendants to reform Nobita’s character, to turn him from a non-entity into a 20th
Century success and thus change history so that these descendants themselves will
enjoy a better life. The fundamental contradiction of the story is that Doraemon
does and does not carry out this task: he is willing to carry out his assignment and
seems to try to, but is constitutionally unable to manage it. The story presents
Doraemon as a model of defective robotic mediocrity himself, merely the best
Nobita’s mediocre descendants could afford; but every plot undermines this
specious plausibility. It is not that Doraemon does not work well, it is that he is the
wrong creature for the job he has been assigned. Because he is unable to resist
Nobita’s importunity, Nobita never learns to rely on and develop his own
capacities. What is the role that dare not speak its name and yet informs
Doraemon’s deepest character? What role relation models this interaction in real
Japanese life?
Not a sensei, not even another child, Doraemon is a mother, a Japanese
mother, which makes all the difference in Japan. Doraemon does not demand, he
indulges. Doraemon does what he is sent to do, and he does not do what he is sent
to do. We are told he cannot, but it actually looks as if he simply won’t.
Doraemon represents himself as having come to save Nobita from a horrible fate,
but it is Nobita’s descendants who have sent Doraemon to save themselves from a
fate they judge horrible enough to at least send a robot back to the past to shape up
Nobita, their ancestor. In the US our parents are the most important choice we
make in our lives, but in Japan people might need to go back farther.
What this might tell us about robots, the elderly rather than children, and
their caregivers in Japan now leaves me feeling slightly uneasy. And considering
the coming transition to SAR care, I have begun to wonder with MIT robotics
researcher Sherry Turkle, is the performance of care, care enough? Turkle points
out how the caring robots being developed in Japan can “take care of us,” but they
would not “care about us” (her italics). Mothers, in one aspect or another, are
Japan’s intimate caregivers. They show that they “care about” the dependent
children and men in their charge by allowing and even fostering a relationship of
affectionate indulgence, identified in the ethnography of Japan with the concept
amae. Children and husbands routinely impose on mothers and take her
indulgence for granted.
Before researching this paper I had not tried to sort through the odd fact that
no matter what our ages we, mothers too, are always our parents’ children; and
now that I have looked, I have not yet been able to find satisfactory evidence that
this element of affection is a routine component of the caregiving relationship
between daughters-in-law or even daughters and the dependent elderly, their own
parents, especially their mothers and mothers-in-law, for whom they care. But the
elderly, especially elderly women -- all themselves mothers -- dread imposing on
their children.
In commenting on the large numbers of bedridden elderly, Kiefer points out,
as have a good number of other researchers before and after him, that allowing
oneself to be dependent on the family is culturally "available" (particularly true for
the very young and the old) and hence, in contrast to North America, there is
indirect encouragement in Japan for the infirm to stay dependent. And yet, as Iwao
counters, “the care of both infants and the elderly rests almost solely on the
shoulders of women.” So it is one thing to say there is such a cultural space
“available,” and another to show that, where it is occupied, what the similarities
might be in the relationship of care-givers and their dependents at both ends of the
age spectrum. There is even a social movement in Japan urging a deeper
examination of the issue of the bedridden in Japan, that infantilization of the
elderly is more than the simple application of standard mothering technique in the
same way to both the very young and the very old. On the contrary, it often
appears as a means of reducing the demands of the elderly, to make the elderly
become bedridden for the care-giver’s own convenience in the way that Doraemon
was sent back to the past to improve Nobita’s character, in the way US nursing
homes have been accused of over-use of sleep medication. All this is the
emotional opposite of amayakasu, indulging a dependent’s need for affection,
which we might sometimes gloss “babying.”
The conclusion is hard to avoid that while this notion of amae and Turkle’s
conception of “care about” must be very close, a third term too must be
considered: meiwaku, trouble, a burden. A person might well not ask for
affectionate emotional indulgence because they do not wish to be a bother. Woss
found that “In one survey conducted on reasons worshipers attend Sudden Death
Temples (pokkuri-dera), 93 percent stated that it was because they did not wish to
become bedridden and a burden on other people. The second most common
response (18 percent) was that people did not want to suffer with a prolonged
illness like cancer.” Susan Long has observed that “Death in Japan is feared more
often than calmly accepted, but as high suicide rates for the elderly suggest,
perhaps it is not feared as much as becoming a burden on others.” Suicide rates for
elderly women are high, higher than for elderly men, and for both elderly men and
women in the US, which is “often interpreted in Japan as an indication of their
unwillingness to burden daughters-in-law with their care.”
Amaeru and meiwaku are the same emotional relation looked at from the
different light of the degree of affection of the person who is being caused trouble
by the person who is making themselves a burden. Children and husbands do not
hesitate to amaeru their mothers and wives, since that is the mother’s/wife’s role,
to take up that burden cheerfully. But this relationship does not appear to extend
from the same woman in her role as care-giver to a dependent parent or parent-inlaw. Or as least the elderly, especially women, do not shed their inhibitions in a
way that would easily let them impose on their caregiver, such that their request for
indulgence would seem to be a burden for their caregiver.
Discussion and Inconclusive Conclusion
Japanese mothers do not build character thru their immediate behavior, they
indulge children and husbands in their need for affection. Although I am not
certain they affectionately indulge the elderly routinely in this same way, the
culture would allow them to do so, as it would allow the elderly to press for
affectionate indulgence if they could bring themselves to overcome their
inhibitions in this area.
So, would the elderly and their intimate caregivers want to have Doraemon
in their lives? Yes. Elders reluctant to press daughters-in-law for the affectionate
indulgence those daughters-in-law are reluctant to give, would develop a youthful
rather than infantilized relationship with Doraemon. (who are now in turn the
superordinates themselves)
So, will Japan’s robot manufacturers’ engineers build robots that care for the
elderly on the basis of their personal intuitions of how women care for children, for
the engineers themselves, or for the elderly as they imagine this care? What is the
necessary feature of engineers, mothers and robots that could let robots care about
the elderly in their charge? Is that even possible? To care for involves acts, to care
about requires emotion. Doraemon feels. Will 22nd century robots not do what you
tell them if you hurt their feelings? How does reluctant yet affectionate indulgence
differ from prompt obedience to commands?
Is it possible that Japan’s robotic engineers could build Doraemon even
without the gadget pouch before 2112? Whether they have thought by now to use
Doraemon as a model for a robotic caregiver for the elderly, they all know him
inside and out. And yet going by the Doraemon we have at present, it seems
unlikely anyone supposes it would make a real or lasting difference in their lives, if
not ultimately make matters worse.