With a surfeit of the old and a shortage of the young, Japan is on course for a population collapse unlike any in human history.
What ails this prosperous nation could be treated with babies and immigrants. Yet many young women here do not want children, and the Japanese will not tolerate a lot of immigrants. So government and industry are marching into the depopulated future with the help of robots — some with wheels, some with legs, some that you can wear like an overcoat with muscles.
A small army of these machines, which has attracted huge and appreciative crowds, is on display this winter at the Great Robot Exhibition in Tokyo's National Museum of Nature and Science.
The Japanese are delighted by robots that look human. Honda's ASIMO can dance and serve tea. Toyota has a humanoid robot that plays "Pomp and Circumstance" on the violin — rather robotically.
But engineers say it's the "service robots," which can't dance and don't look remotely human, that can bail out Japan, which has the world's largest proportion of residents over 65 and smallest proportion of children under 15. One such gizmo can spoon-feed the elderly. Others are being designed to hoist them onto a toilet and phone a nurse when they don't take their pills.
Toyota, the world's largest car company, announced last month that service robots would soon become one of its core businesses. The government heavily subsidises development of these machines. Other cheerleaders for robots include universities and the news media.
Not everyone, though, is cheering. There are critics who describe the robot cure for an aging society as little more than high-tech quackery. They say that robots are a politically expedient palliative that allows politicians and corporate leaders to avoid wrenchingly difficult social issues, such as Japan's deep-seated aversion to immigration, its chronic shortage of affordable day care and Japanese women's increasing rejection of motherhood.
"Robots can be useful, but they cannot come close to overcoming the problem of population decline," said Hidenori Sakanaka, former head of the Tokyo Immigration Bureau and now director of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute, a research group in Tokyo.
"The government would do much better spending its money to recruit, educate and nurture immigrants," he said.
The scale of the coming demographic disaster, assuming present trends continue, is without precedent, according to Sakanaka and many other analysts.
Population shrinkage began here three years ago and is gathering pace. Within 50 years, the population, now 127 million, will fall by a third, the government projects. Within a century, two-thirds of the population will be gone. That would leave Japan, now the world's second-largest economy, with about 42 million people.
The workforce would shrink even faster, thanks to the dearth of children under 15, whose numbers have been falling for 26 consecutive years and now reflect a record-low 13.6 percent of the population.
Within 20 years, the workforce will fall by 10 percent, according to Goldman Sachs, the investment firm. It estimates that within 30 years, Japan will have just two workers for each retiree; within 50 years, two retirees for every three workers. Pension and health care systems will be at risk of collapse.
Robots can help make all this more affordable and less disruptive, said Masakatsu G Fujie, a professor of mechanical engineering at Waseda University in Tokyo.
In a recent lecture to foreign journalists, he said service robots could help reduce government spending on health care, take over many dreary service jobs and prop up Japan's "societal vitality."
Still, if Japan is to have any chance of holding on to its status as a major economic power, it needs human beings by the millions, and it needs to start importing them soon, according to Sakanaka. He argues that Japan has no rational alternative but to open its doors to at least 10 million new immigrants over the next five decades.
This is a tall order. Among highly developed countries, Japan has always ranked near the bottom in the percentage of foreign-born residents. In the United States, about 12 percent are foreign-born; in Japan, just 1.6 percent.
Highly restrictive and aggressively enforced immigration laws have broad support from the Japanese public, which blames immigrants for crime, impolite behaviour and untidiness. Sakanaka's immigration proposal, at least for the time being, has no serious backing among major political leaders.
But the country ranks first in robot use. Forty percent of the world's robots are at work here, mostly in industrial jobs.
The government prefers spending money on robot development rather than on immigrants, Sakanaka said, because robots do not have a political downside. "Politicians avoid the immigration issue because it doesn't lead to a vote," he said. "They should be thinking about Japan's future, but they are not."
The Washington Post
Rely on robots
Robots are still far from being the chatty companions seen in science-fiction movies. But some toy robots are becoming more than just conversation pieces. One recent entry is the i-Sobot from Tomy of Japan. Only 16.5 cm tall, the i-Sobot has a list price of $299, making it less expensive than other advanced robots in the market, which often cost more than $1,000.
The i-Sobot has 17 motors to move its limbs, making it surprisingly fluid. According to James Kuffner, an assistant professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, robots that have 20 or more motors can replicate most human movement.
Like many other toy robots, the i-Sobot has a humanoid shape, which is not accidental, Kuffner said. "A human shape has an appeal," he said. "A dishwasher will only wash dishes, but a humanoid robot can do more."
Among the things they do is fight. Kuffner said that in Japan and South Korea, the centres of innovation in toy robots, people often have toy robot battles.
By 2026, he estimates, consumer robots should be able to perform many chores people find hazardous or distasteful. Honda, the carmaker and a leader in robot design and research, has estimated that a robot the size of a typical 12-year-old can do most household tasks, he said.
The obstacles to building a robot of that size have to do with weight and cost. As robots get larger, they need more gears to move, making them heavier and more expensive.
Robots may also start to look more human, adding facial features and delicate hands, but that poses a psychological problem known as the uncanny valley syndrome. That idea, which was introduced in 1970 by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist, refers to the disquieting effect that objects, particularly robots, have on people if they look too human.
"As you get closer to something human, but it is not a human, it is frightening," Kuffner said. "I have this theory that it goes all the way back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - that you should not play God."
Kuffner said that despite depictions of malevolent robots in movies like the "Terminator" series, there was nothing to fear. If a robot goes haywire, he said, "we can just take out the batteries."
Dylan McClain
New York Times
