By the turn of the millennium, it was clear that Japan had a problem. Numbers that had risen steadily in the past now seemed likely to plateau or, worse, to decline. The situation was without precedent, at least since the good days of the 1960s. Its cause seemed obvious enough: The country faced a crisis of reproduction. Conditions that had held for much of the last half-century no longer did. Ten years of middling economic growth – the so-called ‘lost decade’ – had taken a toll. Vitality had slackened. Industrial output had slowed. A future of predictable growth had given way to a haze of doubt, uncertainty, and risk. Immigrant labour would only exacerbate the problem. Experts contrived a solution as unprecedented as the problem. It targeted the very heart of society itself: home, family, and community. Without attending to the more intimate spaces of social life and grappling with the inherent unpredictability, few believed there would be much chance of success.

Scholars of Japan have become familiar with such dire warnings about the country's population trends. It's not surprising why. The nation's birth rates are among the lowest in the world and have been for years. The proportion of seniors in Japan remains the world's largest and is projected to increase even more in the future. Consciousness of low birth rates and high longevity is so prevalent in Japan that demographic change has become a lens through which many see the social body of the nation itself, as a ‘shōshi kōreika shakai’ (low fertility, ageing society). In 2014 a Pew Research Center survey found that a whopping 87 per cent of those surveyed in Japan perceived the country's growing number of seniors to be a problem (Pew Research Center, 2014).

But the discourse of declinism in Japan is not limited to demographic concerns alone. The gloomy scenario with which this chapter begins does not express worries about human reproduction. It reflects concerns about flagging demand for Japan's population of non-human industrial robots.

For much of the twentieth century, Japan led the world in the application of robots in automobile manufacturing and other industries. At the turn of the twenty-first century, however, experts in the robotics industry feared that demand for their machines, both domestically and internationally, had either already peaked or would do so soon (JARA and JMF, 2001; Yokoyama, 2004).