Tokyo. Japan is running out of workers. With an unemployment rate of just 2.5 percent, a rapidly aging population and a declining birth rate, finding enough people to fill jobs as taxi drivers, baristas and waiters is a major challenge for the country’s economy.
An inventor created a solution that not only allows disabled people greater access to the workplace, potentially tapping into a hugely underutilized sector of the population, but could one day allow seniors to stay active even as their bodies age and avoid loneliness in the process.
At the Dawn cafe in central Tokyo, diners are greeted as they enter the door not by a person, but by a robot avatar. He has a kind voice, two arms with which he gestures to emphasize his words, and a soft face that imitates that of a noh mask from traditional Japanese theater.
Another robot accompanies the diner to their table, takes note of their order and chats with them about their day or, as is often the case with tourists, about their visit to Tokyo. Finally, a third robot carries the coffee on a tray to the table.
As you would expect from a country that has pioneered advances in this field since the 1970s, Japan has different robotic cafes. But while others employ high degrees of automation with artificial intelligence (AI)-powered machines that function like souped-up robotic vacuum cleaners, things at Dawn are very different.
Each robot is controlled by a human, or pilot, as its inventor, Kentaro Yoshifuji, calls them. Using a phone, tablet, or even just technology to track their eye movements, they can control their robot from anywhere in the world, speak through them to interact with customers, and guide them around the coffee shop space.
Yoshifuji does not say that he has invented a robot: he says that he has invented teleportation
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Androids and their pilots make up much of Dawn’s staff (there are up to 90 on the company’s staff), although food and drink preparation is still largely done by humans. But that means that if on any given day there are half a dozen employees visible in the cafe, at least that many are also working remotely from their homes.
What does it mean be present
?
The company wants to emphasize that this is not just a solution for disabled people. The Independent meets with an employee (via her robot OriHime) who lives in Italy with her husband. She explains that the work helps her combat the homesickness that has overcome her after a decade as a Japanese expatriate in Europe. When meeting people in the cafe in Tokyo, when teleport There a few times a week, he maintains a connection with his home country.
At a table are Yariv and Anat, who are visiting Tokyo from Israel with their three children. They are friends with one of the staff members, but it still took a little getting used to the concept.
At first it’s strange
says Anat. We were sitting talking to the kids and suddenly there was another person there. But after that it was really great. The important thing is that it is also worth it for them (the pilots).
Heron and Nallely Trejo, engineers at software from Mexico, but who live in the United States and are on vacation in Japan for two weeks, indicated that the story behind the robot coffee is really inspiring
. They add that they could see the concept working in other countries as well. Should be implemented everywhere
says Nallely.
The cafe opened in 2021 at a time when Japan had a number of strict rules in place around social distancing in public, although it never went into a full Covid lockdown. It’s easy to see why it quickly became a hit: there’s no chance of catching it from a waiter who isn’t actually in the room with you. Or yes?
That question about what it means be present
It is part of the OriHime base, the name Yoshifuji gave to his robots. He came up with the concept when he was a robotics student and felt unable to attend class. He had used a wheelchair since high school, claiming he had a medical condition whose cause doctors could not find and which ultimately prevented him from leaving his room.
Yoshifuji’s teacher threatened to suspend him from class if he did not attend. “I said, ‘Can we use Skype?’ You told me no, right? So I scanned my face and made a mask, and I used it to attend my teacher’s classes like a robot. I listened to his lectures and also raised my hand to ask many questions, and maybe the skin is mine and the hair is also mine. So you have this question: is it really not me? And I asked my teacher: ‘What is attendance?’”
If OriHime was created as a tool to help Yoshifuji and others attend school and college, it soon became clear that this was not enough. “When (people with disabilities) graduate from school they can’t find work. They have nowhere to go to work after graduation, and their employment rate after graduation is about 5 percent. The proportion going to college is about 3 percent.
“Universities, workplaces, cities and towns are designed on the assumption that we can move. We believe that if our body becomes immobile due to a car accident or illness… if we can’t get out of bed, then we can’t move anymore. And when we are not able to move our body, we feel like we can’t do anything, and then we will have negative thoughts and lose the purpose of life, like I did when I was younger.
It can cause loneliness, dementia and also depression. That’s why we are trying to solve these problems with OriHime.
Viable business model
The cafe struggled financially in its first two years due to the high start-up costs involved in the technology, and there were several problems, notably difficulty establishing a fail-safe network connection for the robots. The pilots also had to be trained so that they would not be too polite
explains Yoshifuji; otherwise, people just assumed they were AI.
Drinks are transported around the cafe by larger robots, while smaller models at each table take orders and explain the menu.
But he says the cafe has made a profit for the second year in a row, key evidence of the viability of the model that has allowed the company to consider opening more branches. It has already successfully run pop-up cafes across Japan, helping to raise awareness and support for the concept.
Yoshifuji has much broader ambitions for the difference his avatars can make to Japanese society: he envisions them being used in every school, university and main office in the country, breaking down the mobility barriers that prevent more people from disabled women complete their studies or enter the workforce. Hope to see your pilots graduate
from working in the cafe to finding better jobs thanks to the doors that the OriHime can open.
Change of mentality
Since the golden age of Japan’s postwar economic boom, robots have been used to improve efficiency in almost every industry involving manufacturing, but there is a sense that such innovation can only take the country so far, and growth is slowing down. has stagnated since the 1990s. The shortage of workers, not helped by strict restrictions on all types of immigration, is just one of the factors slowing the economy.
Government figures suggest there are almost 10 million people in Japan with a disability, about 7.6 percent of the population, and in September 2024 there were 36.25 million people in the country aged 65 and over.
There are many people with disabilities in Japan and companies also have to follow rules to hire people with disabilities, but they don’t know how to do it.
laments Yoshifuji. That’s where his robots could make a difference, he suggests. If robotic avatars can help even a small portion of these demographics enter the job market, it could have a big impact on their lives and the country.
Professor Takahiro Ueyama, chief executive member of the Cabinet Council on Science, Technology and Innovation, says Japanese innovators have been more interested in breakthroughs for the benefit of society than in making their own fortunes. We put forward the motto that no one should be left behind, whether it is the aging population or people with disabilities, and people hope that the development of science and technology can improve the well-being of these people.
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It also welcomes radical solutions to reform Japan’s work culture, which has been slow to adapt to changes in the world around it. They are problems, he affirms, that They cannot be resolved in a moment. It takes a long time. It’s not just that we need a lot of new technologies, but also that people’s mentality can adapt to them.
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For the country to fully realize the potential of a technology like OriHime, corporations and civil society need to rethink their structures, be open to change, and, like Yoshifuji’s teacher, be persuaded to modify their definitions of what it means. be present
and contribute to the workforce.
Yoshifuji says changing mindsets has always been harder than inventing robots, and that’s what makes coffee so important. In principle, I believe that new ideas are not accepted, they are not understood. But when you create something, when you make it happen, some people accept it and then they begin to understand.
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