ABSTRACT Japan faces a large and rapidly growing care labor shortage. A common assumption is that the government has a choice between alternatives that will shape the future of its institutional elderly care provision: increase the number of migrant caregivers, or use robots and other emergent technologies to substitute for human carers. This article, based on data from seven months’ ethnographic fieldwork at an elderly care home in Japan that was introducing three different types of care robot, challenges this binary framing. The introduction of these robots served to reconfigure care – increasing the amount of work tasks for human caregivers, deskilling aspects of care labor, and raising overall costs. The robots displaced rather than replaced human labor, recalibrating the distance between carers and recipients of care. While such devices may have been intended by politicians and engineers to solve Japan’s care crisis by replacing human caregivers, the reality of robot use makes this unlikely in the foreseeable future. Yet by reconfiguring care and helping overcome linguistic and cultural barriers – rendering it “culturally odorless” – robots may facilitate the introduction of migrant caregivers at the cost of the further precaritization, commodification, and devaluation of care work.

中文翻译：

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机器人与移民？重构日本机构养老的未来

摘要 日本面临着巨大且迅速增长的护理劳动力短缺。一个普遍的假设是，政府可以在影响其机构养老服务未来的替代方案之间做出选择：增加流动护理人员的数量，或使用机器人和其他新兴技术来替代人类护理人员。本文基于在日本一家养老院进行的 7 个月人种学实地考察的数据，该养老院引入了三种不同类型的护理机器人，对这种二元框架提出了挑战。这些机器人的引入有助于重新配置护理——增加人类护理人员的工作任务量、护理劳动力的非技能化以及提高总体成本。机器人取代而不是取代了人类劳动，重新调整了护理者和接受者之间的距离。虽然政治家和工程师可能打算使用此类设备通过取代人类护理人员来解决日本的护理危机，但在可预见的未来，机器人使用的现实使得这不太可能。然而，通过重新配置护理并帮助克服语言和文化障碍——使其“在文化上无味”——机器人可能会促进移民护理人员的引入，代价是护理工作的进一步贫困化、商品化和贬值。