Futureworld
A
nation once famed for its human touch has become a land of machines
 John Stanmeyer/Saba for TIME The Pana Robo neatly boxes chrysanthemums at a flower factory in Atsumi. |
|
Visitors
to Japan have long been entranced by the personal touch they find in the
country - when they haven't been amazed or dumbfounded. Poets and backpackers
have waxed eloquent about the sublimely arranged gravel of Zen temples
or the delicate construction of a piece of sushi by a proud "master chef."
Shoppers have marveled at the painstakingly wrapped presents that come
from department stores. Or, at the other end of the fussiness scale, the
half-hour needed for a platoon of bank clerks to cash a single traveler's
check.
Goodbye to all that. Change has been coming for decades. But at the start
of the 21st century, daily life in Japan is filled with man-to-machine
encounters. Trains have no drivers on Tokyo's Yurikamome line. At the
Tip Top Hair Salon, shampoos are performed by machine. Order an ice cream
cone at a store in Nagano, and a robot designed to look like a bird does
the serving. Machines may not yet be able to make sushi as a master can
- they are nowhere close, in fact - but they're trying anyway.
For a people renowned for their interpersonal delicacies - bowing is an
elaborate social code - this is quite a change. Japanese still bow on
the telephone. But that's because they know a fellow human is on the other
end. As machines begin to perform more and more of the jobs once filled
by humans, as in convenience stores that have disposed of all clerks,
those codes will either have to adapt or fall by the wayside. And where
the Japanese go, the rest of the world is headed. Get used to it.
Click here for photo essay
Quick Scroll: More stories from TIME, Asiaweek and CNN