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 2008 Japan's Foreign Ministry appointed 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.”

The conclusion is hard to avoid that while this notion of amae and Turkle’s

conception of “care about” must be very close, a third term too must be

considered: meiwaku, trouble, a burden. A person might well not ask for

affectionate emotional indulgence because they do not wish to be a bother. Woss

found that “In one survey conducted on reasons worshipers attend Sudden Death

Temples (pokkuri-dera), 93 percent stated that it was because they did not wish to

become bedridden and a burden on other people. The second most common

response (18 percent) was that people did not want to suffer with a prolonged

illness like cancer.” Susan Long has observed that “Death in Japan is feared more

often than calmly accepted, but as high suicide rates for the elderly suggest,

perhaps it is not feared as much as becoming a burden on others.” Suicide rates for

elderly women are high, higher than for elderly men, and for both elderly men and

women in the US, which is “often interpreted in Japan as an indication of their

unwillingness to burden daughters-in-law with their care.”

Amaeru and meiwaku are the same emotional relation looked at from the

different light of the degree of affection of the person who is being caused trouble

by the person who is making themselves a burden. Children and husbands do not

hesitate to amaeru their mothers and wives, since that is the mother’s/wife’s role,

to take up that burden cheerfully. But this relationship does not appear to extend

from the same woman in her role as care-giver to a dependent parent or parent-in-

law. Or as least the elderly, especially women, do not shed their inhibitions in a

way that would easily let them impose on their caregiver, such that their request for

indulgence would seem to be a burden for their caregiver.

Discussion and Inconclusive Conclusion

Japanese mothers do not build character thru their immediate behavior, they

indulge children and husbands in their need for affection. Although I am not

certain they affectionately indulge the elderly routinely in this same way, the

culture would allow them to do so, as it would allow the elderly to press for

affectionate indulgence if they could bring themselves to overcome their

inhibitions in this area.

So, would the elderly and their intimate caregivers want to have Doraemon

in their lives? Yes. Elders reluctant to press daughters-in-law for the affectionate

indulgence those daughters-in-law are reluctant to give, would develop a youthful

rather than infantilized relationship with Doraemon. (who are now in turn the

superordinates themselves)

So, will Japan’s robot manufacturers’ engineers build robots that care for the

elderly on the basis of their personal intuitions of how women care for children, for

the engineers themselves, or for the elderly as they imagine this care? What is the

necessary feature of engineers, mothers and robots that could let robots care about

the elderly in their charge? Is that even possible? To care for involves acts, to care

about requires emotion. Doraemon feels. Will 22nd century robots not do what you

tell them if you hurt their feelings? How does reluctant yet affectionate indulgence

differ from prompt obedience to commands?

Is it possible that Japan’s robotic engineers could build Doraemon even

without the gadget pouch before 2112? Whether they have thought by now to use

Doraemon as a model for a robotic caregiver for the elderly, they all know him

inside and out. And yet going by the Doraemon we have at present, it seems

unlikely anyone supposes it would make a real or lasting difference in their lives, if

not ultimately make matters worse.