Robots

Hi,
I see that they are now selling household robots in Takashimaya department stores! Anybody have any theories why Japanese people appear to love robots so much?

I have an interest in Japanese robots (I maintain a modest blog on the topic here; Japanese robots) and I have interviewed a few of the top robot researchers. A surprising number of them cite the "Tetsuwan Atom" (aka "Astro Boy") animation series as a positive influence when they were growing up.

The lack of fear of a Terminator-style takeover in the future is, in my experience, a real difference between the Japanese view of robots and that in the West. Anybody care to comment?


Jona

Hm . . . ☝

Interesting idea, jgh4!!! So, what you are suggesting is that the Japanese may have a more benign if not outright favorable view of robots because they have been given positive images of robots in the popular media while in the U.S., a more skeptical image of robots has developed because of opposite images in the popular media? And from these to views of robots comes different habits regarding their use and popularity in daily life?

Wow! I think there are probably exceptions to this (bad Japanese robots and good U.S. robots, to put it crudely), but in general I think you may be on to something here. It would certainly take some looking into to sort out the variosu cultural influences and to understand how popular media playes a role in this . . . *gets a dreamy look in his eyes*

jgh4, I think I have just found my graduate studies project!!! Please, please, please, tell me that you aren't already writing a thesis on this subject and you'll more than happily let me run with it provided years from now I give you glorious credit for the idea?!?

Kokusu,

Glad you found my ramblings interesting. I am happy to say that I am not writing a thesis on this topic. As you will see from my blog, I am writing a book about Japanese robots but this will not go into thesis-level details about the differences between how robots are perceived in Japan compared to elsewhere.

Your eloquent summary of my point was exactly correct. Positive portrayel of robots in the media seems to have a huge effect on Japanese perceptions of the machines. I suspect however, that it goes deeper than this, and further back into the past too...

One interesting thing that a Japanese researcher told me was why there was no Luddite response to robots in Japan. He said that the people respected and were grateful to the machines for taking over the more unpleasant jobs and making people`s lives easier. In addition (and again to grossly generalise) it is often observed that, because of the strict heirarchy that governs face-to-face interactions in Japan, people actually prefer to deal with machines. There certainly are a huge amount of vending machines around!

So yes, please go ahead and use the idea for your thesis. Glorious credit would be great as well as a modest cut of the profits from your various sucessful media tours, TV apearances etc.

Some of the information I have may be useful to you, perhaps you may want to contact me again (on this forum or through my blog).

J

It is the store at which it dropped in when I went to Akihabara.
A specialty store of a robot
http://www.rakuten.co.jp/tsukumo/

http://www.rakuten.ne.jp/gold/tsukumo/movie/KHR1DemoInRoboOne.wmv

I want to buy this robot

It's a good subject for your thesis! It's interesting to me, as a European person, because I really like the idea of robots... household and factories... to take over the more unpleasent and routine jobs that humans have to do. But it's true that I was brought up with very little media of film and TV, so I didn't get a particularly negative image of robots (only ideas from sci-fi novels and news papers). I wonder if that did make a difference to my ideas? :?

Of course, people have concerns that many robots could cause people to be out of work. I can understand this feeling but I still love the idea of the technology so much that my instinct says "worry about that later!"

My mind has been chewing over the possibilities the past few days . . . as soon as I have time (early December?) I will try and update you about where this line of thought is taking me.

I would love to keep in contact, and will do so as ideas develop. For example, I think cultural identity and popular media probably influence each other. For example, people see a robot and feel positively about it, this is reflected back in popular medi. The popular media representation in turn reinforces cultural views. Back and forth it goes. The trick is to see which came first (the chicken or the robot that plucks it) and to determine the weight of influence each possesses on the other. And then there are shifts in cultural opinion, influence from international relations, gender and age differences . . . This could keep me going forever!!!

I remember reading about this topic in the Japan Echo, so I dug up a bit of info with google. There was a special issue of the journal called:
JAPANESE CREATIVITY: ROBOTS AND ANIME
Vol. 30, No. 4, August 2003
There was a bunch of articles about the subject.
Here's an excerpt:
"The tradition of karakuri ningyo (mechanical dolls) dates back to the Edo period (1600–1868), and it is perhaps the influence of this tradition that has spurred the creation in Japan of humanoid robots unlike any machines found anywhere else in the world. I wonder if there is any other country where robots have become a subject for poetry, or where human and robot workers do calisthenics together. Though the Japanese feeling of affinity for robots may strike some Westerners as strange, and though the appeal of anime may be less than universal, it seems fair to say that in both robotics and animation, the Japanese have been expressing their creativity in ways that non-Japanese can appreciate. "

I remember there was also a discussion about how Western culture tended to view the biological and the mechanical as opposing elements, while Japanese culture saw robots as an extension of a human being, or a tool.

I think you should be able to find the journal in most university libraries. I've seen the Japan Echo in a Japanese embassy before too, but I don't know whether they had back issues.

The reason why a robot was received in Japan will be that a Japanese believed in YAOYOROZU(8,000,000 gods).
From ancient times
The Japanese mind that thought that all things had life to both organic matter and an inorganic matter

YAOYOROZU:
http://www.kjps.net/user/m287f/SR/yaoyorozu-e.html#instroduction

The times when an early stage of industrial robot was introduced into a factory
The people attached a person's name to a robot.

Japan Robot Association
Japan Robot Association

KARAKURI Puppet

A manual of the Edo era

wow

thats interesting.thanx for sharing!

Hello everybody

Sorry I haven't present myself in the adequate field yet, il will be done soon.
I wanted to react to the former post, because in France I think that deep down in the collective mind, we don't have the same feeling :

the people respected and were grateful to the machines for taking over the more unpleasant jobs

Click to expand...

In France, I think that people likes technological progress, but robots are often very efficient, and replace a lot of human working people , and thus may be seen as employment thieft.
It is the normal progression of modern society, but this point cannot be put asside.

in Japan, people actually prefer to deal with machines. There certainly are a huge amount of vending machines around!

Click to expand...

It's exactly the opposite in France, there is also machine, but people doesn't like it so much, because they are too difficult to understand for older people,
and they does'nt have the "human warmth" .

Sorry if i have done english mistakes, but don't worry, my japanese skill is worse


Conan is quite happy to have discovered this forum