Robots vs migrants? Reconfiguring the future of Japanese institutional eldercare

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.