ABSTRACT
Claims and concerns for Japanese modernity are often based on Japan's rapid industrialisation and technological advances since the nineteenth century. This paper will describe and evaluate the development of robots in Japan as a positive expression of modernity and also as a source of concern on many levels of the effects of modernisation. It is a version of modernity with dual implications, that can be elicited by examining the multiple influences within Japan and outside in the West upon robot technologies that have given rise to Japan's fear of and fascination for robots. This rendering of Japanese modernity also raises profound questions about the relations between the artificial and the human which are expressed through what I have termed wagamama technology.
