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Demographic Crisis, Robotic Cure?
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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 behavior 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."
Kathy Matsui, Japan strategist for Goldman Sachs, says robot promotion is a crowd-pleasing way for government and business to dance away from the core causes of Japan's low birthrate.
"Robots are simply not going to be able to do anything to deal with the problems of work and family," Matsui said. "Robots cannot raise kids."
And for all their potential, tending to an aging society with robots will not be easy. Designers say the machines -- mostly still in development and years away from entering the market -- must work safely, be affordable and make a profit for manufacturers. Industrial robots overcame many of these hurdles in the 1980s, and Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry expects it to happen again with robots in the home.
"The ignition may be the dramatic decrease in the labor force," said Hideto Akiba, director of the ministry's industrial machine division.
