Therefore, as companies have been buying more robots to do work instead of humans, the U.S. has faced job loss while Japanese companies create new ways for those people to continue to be useful to the company. Finally, another factor has to do with the military. The U.S. has a large military, and the military often funds a lot of the research in robotics. Therefore, a lot of robotics research in the U.S. does, either directly or indirectly, contribute to robots that can hurt people through warfare. Japan, on the other hand, does not have a military. But they do have an aging population, which means that they don't have enough young people to take the jobs of people growing old. Therefore, in Japan, the drive to create robots does not come from the military, but rather from the need to have robots filling important jobs in human society. For those reasons and many more, Japan is much more accepting of robots than the U.S.
Culture is all around us. It shapes how we think, how we talk, how we interact with others and how we understand the world. Cultural differences teach us that what we thought was "normal" in our community is actually just one possible way of doing something. However, you don't have to come all the way to Japan to see cultural differences. You can observe them by going to different neighborhoods, meeting different people or reading about different communities. What cultural differences have you experienced in your life, and what have you learned from them?
