Reverence for ROBOTS

Japanese workers treasure automation

TMORIYA, JAPAN — housands upon thousands of cans are filled with beer, capped and washed, wrapped into six-packs, and boxed at dizzying speeds — 1,500 a minute, to be exact — on humming conveyor belts that zip and wind in a sprawling factory near Tokyo.

Nary a soul is in sight in this picture-perfect image of Japanese automation.

The machines do all the heavy lifting at this plant run by Asahi Breweries, Japan’s top brewer. The human job is to make sure the machines do the work right, and to check on the quality the sensors are monitoring.

“Basically, nothing goes wrong. The lines are up and running 96 percent,” said Shinichi Uno, a manager at the plant.

“Although machines make things, human beings oversee the machines.”

The debate over machines snatching jobs from people is muted in Japan, where birthrates have been sinking for decades, raising fears of a labor shortage.

It would be hard to find a culture that celebrates robots more, evident in the popularity

of companion robots for consumers, sold by the internet company SoftBank and Toyota Motor Corp, among others.

Japan, which forged a big push toward robotics starting in the 1990s, leads the world in robots per 10,000 workers in the automobile sector — 1,562, compared with 1,091 in the U.S. and 1,133 in Germany, according to a White House report submitted to Congress last year. Japan was also ahead in sectors outside automobiles at 219 robots per 10,000 workers, compared with 76 for the U.S. and 147 for Germany.

One factor in Japan’s different take on automation is the “lifetime employment” system. Major Japanese companies generally retain workers, even if their abilities become outdated, and retrain them for other tasks, said Koichi Iwamoto, a senior fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry.

That system is starting to fray as Japan globalizes, but it’s still largely in use, Iwamoto said.

Although data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show digitalization reduces demand for midlevel routine tasks — such as running assembly lines — while boosting demand for low- and high-skilled jobs, that trend has been less pronounced in Japan than in the U.S.

The OECD data, which studied shifts from 2002 to 2014, showed employment trends remained almost unchanged for Japan.

Asahi Breweries employee Kiyoshi Sakai checks the production line at an Asahi factory near Tokyo. Sakai, who has worked at Asahi for 29 years, is grateful for the helping hand from automation.

[AP PHOTOS] RIGHT: Japan is ahead of the U.S. and Europe in introducing robots to the workplace, but that has not resulted in the job reductions in routine midlevel employment observed in other nations.