Technowelfare in Japan : personal care robots and temporalities of care

Abstract

In Japan, powerful actors within government and industry are driving national projects aimed at developing and implementing “personal care robots” to provide care for elderly people. They present this strategy as an economically necessary, and culturally and ethically unproblematic, solution to challenges they associate with an aging population – particularly Japan’s growing care labour shortage. This thesis, based on 15 months’ of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, aims to analyse processes of roboticisation in the care industry and explore what they mean for care and its future. In so doing, the concept of “technowelfare” is introduced – an understanding of welfare as sociotechnical assemblage which acknowledges the growing significance of increasingly sophisticated technologies in welfare provision. This approach combines anthropological approaches to welfare, care and ethics, with social studies of technology and robotics. The first part of the study focuses on the work, labour organisation and management of robotics engineers, while the second looks at care robot use, meanings and practices.

To research the development of these devices, I spent three months conducting ethnographic fieldwork at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), which was leading the largest national robot care project. Additional data was collected through interviews with managers from robotics companies, visits to robot exhibitions, and various other primary and secondary sources. I demonstrate how robotics engineers conceptualise elderly bodies and eldercare practices in abstract terms rather than through direct interaction with prospective users. This involves breaking down the labour of care into a concatenation of discrete, decontextualised tasks that can hypothetically be carried out by robotic analogues in a form of embodied algorithmic care.

The study then focuses on the ways in which three care robots, representing three deconstructed everyday eldercare tasks (lifting, communication and recreation), were introduced into a public elderly care home in Kanagawa. Several months’ of fieldwork revealed complex interplays between time and space – perhaps the most problematic aspects of care provision – and the importance of tactile care in cultivating kin-like relationships between carers and residents. Difficulties in integrating the algorithmic care embodied by robots into the rhythms and relationships of institutional life led caregivers to raise ethical misgivings about the meanings and uses of these devices.

Care robots were intended to supplement or replace human care labour, cutting costs while avoiding substantial increases in immigrant carers entering Japan. Indeed, governments globally are increasingly looking to robots for similar reasons. Yet their actual use revealed the potential to both deskill care labour and impose additional tasks on carers, while their cost remained expensive for publicly funded care institutions. Their widespread implementation would seem therefore to necessitate a greater number of lower-paid and lower-skilled care workers – likely the very immigrant carers that robots were intended to preclude. Finally, in highlighting the disconnection between design and use, the thesis points to the imperative of transparent and inclusive governance in the construction of new technowelfare assemblages for the future of care and care labour in Japan and beyond, as other countries similarly aim to technologise care and welfare.