Robots Won't Save Japan - (Culture and Politics of Health Care Work) by James Adrian Wright (Hardcover)

About the Book

"The book is an anthropological examination of the Japanese government's ongoing attempts to develop and implement robots as a solution to its crisis in elder care"--

Book Synopsis

Robots Won't Save Japan addresses the Japanese government's efforts to develop care robots in response to the challenges of an aging population, rising demand for eldercare, and a critical shortage of care workers. Drawing on ethnographic research at key sites of Japanese robot development and implementation, James Wright reveals how such devices are likely to transform the practices, organization, meanings, and ethics of caregiving if implemented at scale.

This new form of techno-welfare state that Japan is prototyping involves a reconfiguration of care that deskills and devalues care work and reduces opportunities for human social interaction and relationship building. Moreover, contrary to expectations that care robots will save labor and reduce health care expenditures, robots cost more money and require additional human labor to tend to the machines. As Wright shows, robots alone will not rescue Japan from its care crisis. The attempts to implement robot care instead point to the importance of looking beyond such techno-fixes to consider how to support rather than undermine the human times, spaces, and relationships necessary for sustainably cultivating good care.

Review Quotes

Robots Won't Save Japan is a forceful book on a timely subject that is tightly argued, well-researched, and compellingly written from beginning to end. On the interface between care and technology, this is both riveting and humbling.

-- "PACIFIC AFFAIRS"

Extraordinary.

-- "Asian Anthropology"

Provocative and highly readable.

-- "Irish Journal of Applied Social"

This book offers many deep and valuable insights into the practices of eldercare in Japan. With its balanced mixture of refined understandings of on-the-ground realities and broader, well-fitted and important contextualization... this is a highly welcome and most insightful contribution to one of the pressing challenges of our times.

-- "Anthropos"

James Adrian Wright's ethnography Robots Won't Save Japan is dedicated precisely to the gap between promised solution and actual state of implementation of Japanese care robots.

-- "Symbolic Interaction"

Robots Won't Save Japan is a vivid example for how ethnographic research can enrich and deepen our understanding of complex social and political problems

-- "Contemporary Japan"

The title says it all, really, Robots Won't Save Japan, but do read the book if you want to be convinced, because you will be. The author, anthropologist and science and technology studies (STS) scholar James Wright, has adopted this title in reaction to a Japanese book from a generation ago, Robots Will Save Japan (Nakayama 2006).

-- "Anthropology & Aging"

About the Author

James Wright is a Research Associate at the Alan Turing Institute. Follow him on X @jms_wright.