Home> Archive> 2020> Volume 10 Number 1 ( Feb. 2020)
IJSSH 2020 Vol.10(1): 13-16 ISSN: 2010-3646
doi: 10.18178/ijssh.2020.V10.1006

Japanese Society: Where Humans and Robots Coexist

Miyako Takagi

Abstract—From a global point of view, Japan seems to be the only place where communication robots like Sony's AIBO and Honda's ASIMO are entertained. Why does the communication robot boom not occur outside Japan? This difference may be due to the difference in the sense of robots in Japan and Western countries, and the so-called “robot view.” In Japan, the generation who watched “Astro Boy” and “Doraemon” from a young age recognizes that “robot is a friend” and this conception may be passed on to the future. Communication includes the irrational element of human beings that cannot be grasped by technology alone, and it happens that people love an incomplete robot rather than a complete one. In a society where humans and robots coexist, weak robots show that the ability to communicate with humans is more important than the completeness of individual robots. It was pointed out that the receptionist robot developed in Japan promotes gender bias. The robot has no intention of its own, so if there is a gender bias, it reflects the feelings of the person who made it. What about the introduction of robots to nursing care sites? Robots may be considered to assist care workers, and caregivers don’t lose their jobs. On a survey on “awareness about care”, when asked if they would want to receive physical care from a nursing robot when they are being cared for in the future, 84% of respondents give a positive response.

Index Terms—Communication between older people and robots, gender issues in robots, imperfect communication robot, Japanese view of robots.

Miyako Takagi is with Faculty of Human Welfare, Tokyo Online University, Nishi-Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, Japan (e-mail: takagi.miyako@internet.ac.jp).

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Cite: Miyako Takagi, "Japanese Society: Where Humans and Robots Coexist," International Journal of Social Science and Humanity vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 13-16, 2020.

Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).
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