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 2008Japan's Foreign Ministryappointed 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.”