Paper short abstract:

The Japanese government is working on developing robotic care solutions to overcome the labor shortage. This article discusses professional women in Japan and their burden of caring for aging relatives, and how introducing robotic care devices might reduce current anxieties regarding eldercare.

Paper long abstract:

The elder population in Japan is increasing drastically, causing a number of issues that have not yet been encountered by Western countries. Demographic data from Japan reveal that the Japanese have the longest lifespan globally, resulting in the country having the world’s highest population of elderly people. At the same time, the country has a rapidly declining birth rate. As the population is aging, the workforce is shrinking and leaving a high number of elders with fewer caregivers to look after them. At present, the Japanese government is working on the development of robotic care solutions to overcome the labor shortage in eldercare, implementing a new agenda to increasingly introduce social robots to assist in the field. This article discusses professional women in Japan and their burden of caring for aging relatives, and how introducing robotic care devices might reduce current anxieties regarding the provision of eldercare. It analyzes the eldercare strategies of 12 white-collar professional women in their forties and fifties, and examines the extent to which gendered, expected at-home caregiving affects their professional commitments and associated anxieties. The findings are expected to provide crucial insight into the most effective strategies that can be used by Japanese women to balance their careers with responsibilities to care for elderly relatives, particularly when it is impossible to predict the intensity of caregiving in the future.