  Imagine activating new robots meant to aid staff in an elder care facility,
only to discover the robots are counterproductive. They undermine the most
meaningful moments of the jobs and increase staff workloads, because robots
demand care too. Eventually, they're returned. This vignette captures key
elements of James Adrian Wright's ethnography, "Robots Won't Save Japan", an
essential resource for understanding the state of elder care robotics. Wright's
rich ethnographic interviews and observations challenge the prevailing funding,
research, and development paradigms for robotics. Elder care residents tend to
be Disabled, so this review article augments Wrights' insights with overlooked
perspectives from Disability and Robotics research. This article highlights how
care recipients' portrayal suggests that Paro, a plush robot seal, might
perform better than the care team and author indicated -- leading to insights
that support urgent paradigm shifts in elder care, ethnographic studies, and
robotics. It presents some of the stronger technical status quo
counter-arguments to the book's core narratives, then confronts their own
assumptions. Furthermore, it explores exceptional cases where Japanese and
international roboticists attend to care workers and recipients, justifying key
arguments in Wright's compelling book. Finally, it addresses how "Robots won't
save Japan" will save Robotics.
