On posthuman imaginaries and Japanese robot culture: A techno-oriental strand of cruel optimism

Despite renewed emphasis on developing robots’ social competence in relational terms, resemblance to humans remains an ideal. This essay attributes this to how posthuman visions in popular media refract and inform our needs. Images and narratives of technological engagements naturalize human-robot relationships as an achievable frontier, among other possibilities. This work examines three strategies that render their appeal: overlay, refraction, and defamiliarization. The author explains the strategies’ affective functions for priming receptivity to social robots with sequences from film (After Yang 2022) and digital games (Detroit: Become Human 2018). Taking Japanese robot culture as example, the discussion considers its underlying intersections of popular media, rhetoric on national identity, and traditions. The focus is on how much Japan’s engagements with robots and technologies constitute “cruel optimism,” attachments based in limiting notions of life fulfillment. In tracing if such attachments involve techno-oriental views, this essay illustrates a critique that scales from media experiences, cultural attitudes, through aspects of technoculture.