Published on June 5, 2019
Job titles and other details are as of the time of publication.
(The interview was conducted in Japanese and was thereafter translated into English.)

Focusing on how technology and humans affect and change each other

“What is technology to humankind? What can it be for humankind?” This is the theme of my research.

Specifically, I have been trying to analyze how robots, AI, and other creations of advanced technologies interact with people in our daily lives, from a perspective cutting across science and culture. So far, I have conducted research on the development and acceptance of the entertainment robot AIBO, the evolution of mechanical engineering, computer science, manga and anime expression related to robots, the interaction between professional shogi players and shogi software in the Den-O Sen match, and the co-emergence of technology and ethics in the history of home cooking.

Rather than simply viewing the technologies around us as convenient tools or infrastructures, I focus on how technology and humans evolve as they affect each other. I explore this world which is intertwined with technology – how it is and how it can be – without drawing distinctions between science and culture, or science studies and the humanities.

Opening up the language of humanities and social sciences to science and technology

Technology has a huge impact on our society and daily lives. This is our general view. However, social sciences that study our social lives have never really treated technology as a main subject, and this is because it is supposed to exist outside of society. But, for example, if we ask the question, “Is traditional Japanese dance so remote from technology that it would be impossible to consider it scientifically?” Of course not. For instance, there is actual research that analyzes the way Japanese dance is performed by incorporating the use of wireframe models.

Although we usually think of Japanese dance and technology as things that do not go together, when it is expressed in wireframe models or computer graphics, people suddenly say, “This is technology!” This is because we see technology as an element outside of ourselves, while we consider Japanese dance to be within our culture or society. When techniques and technologies become widespread, it no longer becomes a question of substance. Rather, the focus is placed on the individuals and groups who use the technologies, and the social and cultural structures that define them.

New technologies are placed outside of human society and culture. But as soon as they become widespread, they are brought inside and no longer squarely analyzed. Is it possible for us to properly assess the contemporary world like this? This is my concern. So, instead of focusing on either society or science, or humans or technology, I believe we should look at the interaction between the two sides head on, and this should open up the fundamental analytical concepts and methods of the humanities and social sciences to science and technology. This is the basic direction of my research.

Contemporary myths and Pokémon

Now, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss conducted an analysis of the vast number of myths told by the indigenous peoples of North and South America. Many of their stories describe how there were no clear boundaries between humans and animals at the beginning of the world. For example, there is an episode in which a human transforms into a coyote and goes to a coyote village and takes a coyote wife. He learns various skills including how to make fire and grow plants, and eventually returns to his village.

Meanwhile, modern society has always been obsessed with the idea that someday we will be making machines that look exactly like humans. In the sense that people can perceive humanlike non-human entities (animals or machines) as humans, whether in the past or in the future, perhaps we residents of a modern society are also living in a myth, very much like the people of non-modern societies. This is the thought that prompted me to study and analyze robots like AIBO, or Pokémon like Pikachu from the Pokémon series.

The Pokémon game has constantly evolved in terms of content and format coinciding with progresses made in technology. But at its foundation, I believe Pokémon are both creatures and mechanically processed data within the game. The Pokémon game developers were born in the suburbs and grew up as boys collecting insects in the rich natural environment, before urban development had taken place. In junior high and high school, they became fanatical “game freaks” who could analyze the arcade games down to the circuit boards. These individuals went on to connect the creatures they were fond of as a child with the game characters they loved in their youth, and that produced the Pokémon, which are “creatures = data.”

In the 1990s, electronic pets like Tamagotchi and AIBO were subject to ethical scrutiny where critics said that mechanical pets should not be replacing living creatures. But I believe the Pokémon series managed to dodge such criticism – for better or worse – by specifically demonstrating how humans can coexist with entities that are both creatures and mechanical data. When I give lectures at university, I get the feeling that perhaps people in their 20s or 30s today have a relationship with Pokémon that serves as an important reference axis for their imagination or thought process. So I am studying this as an example of how we today are living in a “myth" centered on the relationship between the three elements of animals, machines, and humans.

Human proactiveness is born from passiveness towards non-human entities

I would like to note here that the notion that humans should be able to have complete control over the technologies they create, because they created them in the first place, is absolutely groundless.

For example, humans cannot create farmland just by themselves. There has to be soil and water, which humans cannot create out of thin air. Machines also need materials, and these materials, or non-human entities, are not created by humans from scratch. Technology is the product of the interaction between humans and non-human entities. If we think about it in this way, for example, a nuclear plant accident and ensuing radiation problems or food risks are not simply a question of how humans should take control. We begin to see it as an important specific case of interaction between humans and non-human entities.

For instance, even this interview would not be possible without the clothes I wear, the desk, camera, recorder, notebook, pen, etc. This interview manages to exist because of all of these various elements, and even my facial expressions during our conversation. When you think about it in this way, it may seem as though humans are in control of their creations, but in actual fact they are also being controlled.

Although, if you start questioning which side is really in control, or how humans can regain control, you will find yourself going round and round in circles. Rather, I believe the reason why it seems that humans are capable of actively observing and controlling various non-human entities is because we maintain a passive relationship with them in a certain way. By analyzing how our passive relationships with non-human entities manage to generate a proactiveness in humans, we can explore what we humans are about and what we can potentially be. I believe that this is the significance of anthropological research into technology.

Home-cooked meals: examining how technology actually works in daily life and society

In cultural and social anthropology, it is important to pay attention to the details of specific situations and to find a way to reconstruct existing ideas in a relative form. So lastly, I would like to introduce a study on home cooking as a familiar example.

Phrases like “taste of home” or “taste of handmade cooking” became widespread in the 1960s and 1970s after the explosive spread of instant and frozen foods. So the food industry had made it possible to provide all the meals at home with food that was mechanically produced in factories. The spread of such options then gave rise to the idea of “handmade cooking” or “taste of home” to describe non-factory-made food.

But technically we could describe the factory-produced lunch boxes sold at convenience stores as “handmade” because they are also prepared by hand by humans. Or even with a nikujaga (meat and potatoes) dish prepared at home, it would still be using seasonings that have been produced by manufacturers as a result of their many years of research, as well as potato varieties that have been improved by farmers. Therefore, you could say that homecooked meals are nothing more than people reprocessing already processed food, just like the convenience store lunch boxes. But it is probably hard for us to let go of the ambiguous ethical view that “homecooked meals are good.” Moreover, this view emerged precisely because of the advances in technology and industries in recent decades. Our passive relationship with the non-human entities (instant foods, refrigerators, microwaves, recipes, ingredients...and so on) has made us proactively think that “home cooking is better,” resulting in being critical of lazy cooking at home.

Therefore, I believe that, rather than having an ambiguous image of technology and placing it outside of society and culture, we need to think about the relationship between technology and humans in specific everyday situations. This may be very difficult but I believe it to be an exciting challenge as I explore the idea of us as humans in the contemporary world.