ABSTRACT
Since the term “robot” first appeared in the Japanese lexicon in 1923, the imagery of robots has captured both anxieties and hopes about the role of machines in the everyday, which has undergone rapid changes to the present day. In Japan, especially in popular cultural texts, robots are often depicted as emotionally expressive, clumsy, imperfect, and capable of love and affection. These representations extend to contemporary commercial sociable robots claiming the emotional capability to “stay close to people.” Based on her fieldwork in Japan (2017–2018), close reading of two anime, and analysis of a commercial for robots, Nishimura argues that popular cultural narratives play a vital role in shaping the public perception of robotic machines that interact with humans. Specifically, the author identifies a particular trope in Japanese popular narratives that depicts a robot’s capacity to meet humans’ emotional needs through differences. The narratives first stress the mechanical constitution of robots (difference in origins) and second, show that they cannot fulfill the practical needs of humans (difference in functionality). Popular fictional narratives of human-machine relationships thus function as a script, both literally and figuratively, of both potential and actual forms of humans’ relationships to machines.
