Materializing dreams: Humanity, masculinity, and the nation in contemporary Japanese robot culture

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the technological visionaries who build humanoid robots in contemporary Japan. It examines how this emergent field has become an experimental site for the redefinition of self, identity, and humanity. In particular, it analyzes the processes by which humanoid robots become the subjects of intense affective and psychological investment by independent amateurs as well as by roboticists at academic and industrial institutions. By developing humanoid robots as welcome sources of social interaction and emotional exchange, hence challenging the definition of what is human, these engineers concomitantly reconfigure the possibilities for humanity and personhood in this hyper-technologized society.;The "robotic" rationalization and man-machine hybridization that have accompanied the processes of global neoliberalism and virtual communication have resulted in unprecedented levels of disembodiment and depersonalization. These issues have been widely problematized in contemporary Japan. The activity of building robots allows individuals to "recuperate" their humanity, as they connect with themselves and others through these human-shaped machines, regaining something that has been lost in modern society.;Furthermore, cultural narratives of intimacy, conventionally founded on relationships between humans, are being reproduced and embodied in human interactions with humanoid robots. The Japanese concept of kokoro ("heart/mind"), one of the most popular tropes permeating contemporary Japanese robot culture, serves as a discursive interface that enables intimate relationships between humans and non-human objects. I also argue that robot builders perceive their robot building activity as authentic engineering, in contrast to their professional projects. Robot building is thus recuperative in that it reconnects them to masculine identities through technology, and is metaphorically conceptualized through the concept of otoko no roman ("male romanticism").;This romanticism which pervades current humanoid research departs from engineering's traditional, pragmatic preoccupation with reason and utility. The humanoid is instead a site for technological enchantment, as its designers privilege subjective desires and emotions over the purely functional goals of modern engineering. Building humanoid robots in Japan is mediated by symbolic and social psychological dynamics---including vestiges of Japan's modernization period---that negotiate between national dreams of both rational modernity and re-enchanted postmodernity.