Japanese Senior Dolls

Japan has one of the highest abortion rates in the world.

As a result, they have a rapidly greying population.

As a result, the wave of Japanese seniors frequently has no children to take care of them, or at least no children in their homes.

As a result, Japanese toy companies like Bandai have turned from making toys for tots to making toys for seniors, specifically: child-like dolls that seniors can interact with.

Excerpts:

Talking toys have become such a hit that some elderly people have embraced them as substitutes for the children who have grown old and deserted entire neighborhoods in the rapidly greying country.

The Yumel doll, which looks like a baby boy and has a vocabulary of 1,200 phrases, is billed as a "healing partner" for the elderly and goes on the market Thursday at a price of 8,500 yen (80 dollars).

Another toymaker, Bandai, in November 1999 launched the Primopuel doll which is meant to resemble a five-year-old boy who needs the same sort of attention, asking to be hugged and entertained.

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Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

13 thoughts on “Japanese Senior Dolls”

  1. A large genre within anime and manga deals with just this sad phenomenon: the replacement of human beings and human relationships by robots.
    I remember one part of Robot Carnival deals with an old man who is all alone so he builds himself a robot that looks like a little girl. He is happy for a time but then he dies and, I believe, it ends by showing the robot just sitting there and rotting.

  2. Wish I could find Robot Carnival on DVD (any region) or VHS (NTSC). Unfortunately, haven’t been able to locate it.
    I could probably order it from Amazon’s Japanese site, except I can’t read or type in Japanese (but Nihongo ga skoshi wakarimasu).
    Anyone have any ideas?

  3. Isn’t Bandai the same toy company that offered its female employees a million yen for every child above replacement level?

  5. Thanks! Just ordered one.
    Now if they’d put it out on DVD like they *FINALLY* did “They Were 11.”

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