It is my understanding that Japan has a horrific birth rate and ratio of elderly to working-age adults, necessitating nursing care robots.

In many Western countries, the answer to these problems has been immigration. However, Japan is famously insular; a prospective immigrant cannot hope to naturalize as a Japanese citizen they way one could in, say, Canada or Germany.

So Japan is otherwise stuck with three options: let the elderly wither and die with little care or dignity, commit a vast portion of Japan’s relatively scarce workforce to take care of its elders, or robots.

Japan picks robots.