Posthumanity and transhumanity discourse tends to stake its claims on vulgarized notions of what constitutes a human, a person, a self and/or a body prior to “post” and “trans” versions of these material, conceptual, and living entities.

In an effort to critique, historicize, denaturalize, and ground such concepts in social practice, the participants in this workshop will consider these and associated propositions by examining “J BodyMachines”—instances of encounter and use, mimicry and replacement, and the interpenetration of bodies with machines in modern and contemporary Japan.

Participants

The Dollmaker, the General, and the Madman Artist

No other modern institution has been quite as invested in building and maintaining the right kind of bodies (and minds) to populate and animate it as the military. At the same time, the military’s charge has been ultimately harmful—both physically and psychologically, if not entirely destructive to many of those same bodies and minds. This paper aims to describe a series of technological innovations designed to repair and enhance human bodies damaged by mass violence and forging unlikely bonds among the theater stage, the imperial household, and military of all ranks.

Disabled Imperial Army veterans wrestling in front of an audience of disabled Imperial Army veterans (undated). Included with the permission of Shōkeikan, Tokyo.

 Innovative Histories

“Innovative Histories” examines three transport innovations in modern Japan – the human-powered railway, the cargo automobile, and the rolling cart – to show how human power has been incorporated into transport technology in both explicit and implicit ways throughout Japan’s modern period. It is chapter one in my in-progress manuscript, The Rickshaw and the Railway: Labor, Transport, and Technology in Modern Japan.

Mobility” in Realizing Society 5.0. 

Cybernetic Avatars as Prosthetic Bodies

The Japanese government has been funding “cybernetic avatar” technologies under the Moonshot R&D Program since 2020 to solve the labor shortage of a super-aged society. The aim is to integrate older people, persons with disabilities, or women caring for children or relatives into the workforce using robot avatars for remote work. Although the term “cybernetic avatar” is of recent origin, I trace these technologies back to teleoperation, robotic prosthetics, and the concept of “telexistence” of the 1980s. Analyzing how the engineers developing these technologies conceptualize the relationship of humans and machines, I discuss how avatar technologies relate to transhumanist ideas, understandings of disability, and enhancement.

Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) Moonshot R&D Program Goal 1

The Myth of Post-Human Childcare in 1920s Japanese Infant Food Advertisements

This paper examines how, in response to the 1910s infant mortality crisis, breast milk substitute producers in 1920s Japan promoted their products as a solution to overcome the perceived deficiency and unreliability of maternal bodies. I argue that while advertisers claimed to render maternal bodies and corporeal labor obsolete, these products did not substitute but rather supplemented existing embodied childcare practices. As such, the quite literal post-human fantasy that infant food advertisers promoted did not limit but instead expanded the corporeality of modern childcare. Using a corporeal feminist approach, I critically analyze dairy, formula, and condensed milk advertisements, along with instructions on their labor-intensive preparation process, to reveal how the maternal body, even when professed to have become irrelevant, remained fundamental to post-human imaginations of childrearing in prewar Japan.

Yomiuri shinbun advertisement for the Sankei Co. Nursing Device (1928).

Folktales, Fertility,  Futures:  An Overview of Eugenic Ectogenesis in Japan

Ectogenesis, or the gestation of fetuses outside of the uterus, has long been a science fiction theme that today is technologically feasible. Whether in fictional or non-fictional references, ectogenesis is proposed as a (bio)technological solution to a variety of demographic challenges, from reproductive sterility to eugenic reproduction. Using Japan as my main “fieldsite,” I explore a spectrum of ectogenetic discourses and constituent narratives in fiction and non-fiction alike. By the late 19th century, these discourses converged within a framework of eugenics and scientific imperialism to address the urgent demographic demands of nation-building. In recent decades, proposed solutions to the plummeting birthrate enlist these earlier ectogenetic discourses in rationalizing the development of new pronatalist technologies, from artificial uteruses to “embryo space colonization.”

Japanese cartoon image of ectogenesis.

Twilight Years as Capitalist Frontiers: Fantasies of Care Robots and Datafication of Vitality

Taking the tensions surrounding the push for "productive care (seisanteki kaigo)" as a point of departure, this paper traces the government-led movement to develop "care robots (kaigo robotto)" within the context of population concerns and gender politics in modern Japan. By examining how robotic innovation has shifted from humanoids to surveillance technologies, I argue that elderly care has become a new frontier for extracting vital data as raw material or capital, enabling new forms of gendered exploitation in the care economy.

Suma visiting the lab of Prof. SAEGUSA Ryo in Kanagawa, Japan, in 2022, pictured here with Patrol Robot KURUMI.