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Office Hours: Associate Professor of East Asian Studies Shawn Bender

by Tony Moore

Associate Professor of East Asian Studies Shawn Bender received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of California at San Diego. His recent research has focused on the connections among discourses of demographic crisis, changes in elder care, and the development of robotics in Japan and Europe. His publications have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies and Social Science Japan Journal, and his second book, , has recently been published.

East Asian studies seems like a broad field, but it’s one that has some really interesting, pinpoint-sharp facets, as you explore in your newest book. What makes Dickinson a great place to study the cultures of a collection of countries on the other side of the world?

Our faculty represent an unusually broad range of specialization. There aren’t many departments of East Asian studies, for starters. A few faculty members teaching Japanese or Chinese and an East Asia specialist in history or literature is the typical pattern. Here at Dickinson we have social scientists of Japan and China, an East Asian historian, a specialist in East Asian art, and several faculty focused on literature and film in Japan and China. Coupled with our abroad programs in Taiwan, Korea and Japan, we offer a lot, even with vacancies left by recently retired faculty. Beyond the department level, our Research and Development Committee provides competitive funding for the kind of shorter-term research projects that are vital to doing research from start to finish. So, yes, Dickinson is a great place to study East Asia.

Your new book explores the use of robotics in healthcare systems with aging populations, to dumb it down a little. I’m on the fence about this being a great leap forward or a cry for help by systems that don’t have enough people to care for their elders. What do you think, and what got you interested in the issue?

Many years ago, I learned about attempts to use robots to care for older adults in Japan and became fascinated with the idea. Perhaps like you, I wondered how this could work. Robots are machines, after all. The idea that machines could successfully function within the delicate environments of eldercare just seemed really hard to imagine. I wanted to see how robots were used and what care workers thought about them. This led me to research in Japan but also to sites in Europe where robots from Japan were used, to my surprise, even more extensively than at home. To get at the other part of your question, interest in these technologies is largely driven by demographic concerns, both about aging populations and a shrinking pool of care workers. But in my fieldwork I found such fears (or hopes) that robots might replace human care workers to be misplaced. Nowhere was this the case. The robots I encountered were always used by care workers or in interaction with them and care recipients, even if the machines could function autonomously. Perhaps someday there will be intelligent machines that can substitute for human workers, but we’re not there yet.

Your focus is on Japan, a place that has always struck me as interesting in ways that most countries just aren’t (the blend of ancient tradition, boisterous pop culture and technology comes to mind). What propelled you to center your life’s work on the Japanese people and their culture?

I’ve long had an interest in how society and culture shape the way that people think about the world. After university, when I had the opportunity to spend a year and a half working at an English conversation school in Japan, I jumped at the chance. Japan had always been a presence for me growing up. It was hard to ignore its economic influence and global dominance in consumer technology, but I was hardly a Japanophile. I started taking Japanese lessons in the mornings before teaching English and developed a real passion for the language and curiosity about the place and people. By the end of my stay, I knew I wanted to pursue graduate study in cultural anthropology. I kept up with my Japanese study and later chose Japan as a site for doctoral fieldwork. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been back and forth since then!

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Published January 8, 2025