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Demographic Crisis, Robotic Cure?
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A principal reason for the low birthrate in Japan is the increasing refusal of young women to marry. Government figures show that the percentage of women 25 to 29 who stay single has more than doubled since 1980, to 54 percent from 24 percent.
If Japanese women do marry and have children, they drop out of the workforce at far higher rates than women in other wealthy countries. The primary reason is because they cannot find affordable day care, according to Matsui and many others.
Matsui said affordable child care and relaxed immigration rules that allowed working mothers to hire foreign-born nannies would almost certainly keep more women in the workforce -- and could help raise the birthrate.
Asked why government and industry here are so taken with robots, Matsui said: "They are a nice excuse not to address the issue of immigration. They do not cause crime. They are not foreign people. And the Japanese are good at making robots."
At Toyota, robot-builders say it is not their job to answer big-picture questions.
They focus, instead, on how to make machines that help elderly people live comfortably and are safe, affordable and profitable.
In the next 10 to 20 years, Toyota contends, the most useful of these robots will be smart, highly mobile, wheelchair-like devices that bear little resemblance to robots in the movies.
"We are not focused on making robots that look like people," said Masashi Yamashta, general manager of Toyota's Partner Robot development division. "We aim to take the elderly outside with these machines."
The two-wheel "mobility robot" that Toyota introduced in Tokyo last month can carry a person over uneven ground or can act as a porter, following its owner with groceries or some other load. If the machines work well and are affordable, it is "realistic" that a partner robot will someday be in every home in Japan, Yamashta said.
"Are you going to let strangers into your home?" he asked. "Or do you have robots?"
In Japan, the preference seems to be for machines.
