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Encountering Robots While Still Using Fax Machines in Japan

Motoko Rich, The New York Times’s Tokyo bureau chief, with Pepper, a robot made by SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate. Credit Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times
Motoko Rich, The New York Times’s Tokyo bureau chief, with Pepper, a robot made by SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate. Credit Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times
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Encountering Robots While Still Using Fax Machines in Japan

Motoko Rich, The New York Times’s Tokyo bureau chief, with Pepper, a robot made by SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate. Credit Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times
Motoko Rich, The New York Times’s Tokyo bureau chief, with Pepper, a robot made by SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate. Credit Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times

How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Motoko Rich, The Times’s Tokyo bureau chief, discussed the tech she's using.

What kind of tech tools do you use to cover news in Japan?

Probably the most important piece of hardware I regularly use — aside from my laptop and cellphone — is a backup battery to recharge my phone and power my laptop on the road.

North Korean missile tests have disproportionately occurred while I have been out of the office reporting on another story or attending a school event for my children, or over the weekend. So if I have to set up on the side of a soccer field or on a bus, I just plug my phone and laptop into a Mophie Powerstation XXL, a battery the size of a mass-market paperback (although considerably heavier).

I also have a much smaller battery that I can use to juice up my phone when it starts to die from too much live tweeting, but the XXL comes in handy if I actually have to report and write a whole story away from the office or my home or a hotel room. In such a situation, I will use either a portable Wi-Fi or the personal hotspot on my cellphone to get online.

Twitter is very popular in Japan, so if we want to get a sense of the mood about a particular breaking news story — much as we do in the United States — my researchers will scan Twitter or Facebook to get a sense of how people are reacting to news. Occasionally a tweet can be the seed of a feature story.

Earthquake apps like QuakeFeed are also helpful in quake-prone Japan, not to mention as early indicators of nuclear tests in North Korea.

Since I make a lot of calls to analysts and government officials in the United States either very early in the morning or late at night (Tokyo is 13 hours ahead of New York and Washington), I try to use WhatsApp or Skype to call people abroad since my Japanese cell plan charges extra for overseas calls. My small beef with the academics who specialize in Japan and the Korean Peninsula is that so many of them seem incapable or unwilling to use internet-based calling apps.

What interesting tech trends do you see emerging in Japan that haven't yet reached the United States?

Robots! I frequently run into a version of Pepper, a child-size cartoonish robot made by SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate. Its founder, Masayoshi Son, has recently talked about the coming “Singularity,” in which artificial intelligence outstrips humans. I encountered an android tourist greeter at a mall, and television news programs frequently feature some new application of robotic technology, from restaurant servers to nursing home caregivers.

For personal texting, Line, a communications app that started after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, is extremely popular. So I communicate with friends, my staff and even the woman who cuts my hair using Line. Part of the reason it's so popular here is its wide variety of emoticons and digital stickers.

How do you use tech differently in Japan than you did in the United States?

The weird thing about Japan is that although it seems technologically advanced, it is still behind the times in many ways. As The Times has written before, the fax machine is still a cherished piece of technology in Japan. Many sources demand that we send requests for interviews and sample questions via fax and will simply not accept an email. I can’t remember the last time I sent or received a fax in the United States.

My 11-year-old son has a small “keitai,” or kids’ cellphone, that is programmed so he can only call or receive calls from me, my husband or his sister. By the time we left Brooklyn in 2016, it seemed like most kids his age either didn't have a phone at all, or had a smartphone. A lot of Japanese children, as young as age 6, have such keitais, which enable them to independently travel on subways and walk to and from school on their own while still being reachable. We often run into very small children on their own on the subway platform, the small phones dangling from their backpacks.

Mobile payment systems have been slow to gain traction in America. How about in Japan?

Unlike China, where people pay for almost everything with smartphones, Japan is resolutely a cash-based society. There are many restaurants that will not accept credit cards, much less mobile payments.

Japan has a prepaid card, known as Suica, that is mostly used to pay for train fares but can also be used to pay for items from vending machines or convenience stores as well as taxi rides. Mobile payments via Suica have been available on mobile phones in Japan since 2006. Although these systems have been around for years, this technology hasn’t spread to popular devices like the iPhone until recently.

Beyond your job, what tech product are you currently obsessed with using in your daily life?

FaceTime, Skype and WhatsApp are lifelines for staying in touch with friends and family back home. My 13-year-old daughter regularly talks to her best friends in Brooklyn and in England on FaceTime, and the other day I Skyped into a meeting of my Brooklyn book group.

I really only began posting regularly to Instagram once I moved to Japan, because I want everyone at home to be able to see what I’m seeing every day, here and in South Korea, where I travel regularly to report. Japan and Korea are visually sumptuous places, and, yes, I am one of those clichéd people who post photos of their lunches.

My daughter is obsessed with Snapchat and streaks, an activity whose point I have yet to grasp. But I have been surprised by the number of times she'll tell me that she has seen some news item on Instagram or Snapchat, an activity whose point I wholeheartedly endorse.

Not long after we moved here, we caved and bought AppleTV and subscribed to a VPN so that we could keep up with our favorite American TV shows and movies. Much as I think it is important to experience as much of the local culture as possible, I know that keeping on top of the popular culture from home is a way of staying connected to friends and family, too. Streaming, though, is often sluggish, and the screen will freeze in the middle of a show while we stare balefully at the loading spinner.

The robotics industry is important to Japan. Meanwhile, personal digital assistants like Siri and Google Assistant are trendy in the United States. Where do you think this is all taking us?

Unlike in the United States, where workers fear automation taking over their jobs, robotics are embraced here in Japan by the government, corporate sector and broader society. The government is anti-immigration, so one of its oft-cited solutions to a declining population and shrinking labor force is to rely increasingly on artificial intelligence.

Whether robots can actually accomplish all the tasks they are being promoted for is an open question. I wonder whether something as personal as nursing home care can really be outsourced to robots. As a parent, I would hate the thought that robots would be used in day care facilities, unless it was just for food preparation or cleanup.

(The New York Times)

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Interviews

Goldrich to Asharq Al-Awsat: No US Withdrawal from Syria

US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Ethan Goldrich during the interview with Asharq Al-Awsat
US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Ethan Goldrich during the interview with Asharq Al-Awsat
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Goldrich to Asharq Al-Awsat: No US Withdrawal from Syria

US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Ethan Goldrich during the interview with Asharq Al-Awsat
US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Ethan Goldrich during the interview with Asharq Al-Awsat

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Ethan Goldrich has told Asharq Al-Awsat that the US does not plan to withdraw its forces from Syria.

The US is committed to “the partnership that we have with the local forces that we work with,” he said.

Here is the full text of the interview.

Question: Mr. Goldrich, thank you so much for taking the time to sit with us today. I know you are leaving your post soon. How do you assess the accomplishments and challenges remaining?

Answer: Thank you very much for the chance to talk with you today. I've been in this position for three years, and so at the end of three years, I can see that there's a lot that we accomplished and a lot that we have left to do. But at the beginning of a time I was here, we had just completed a review of our Syria policy, and we saw that we needed to focus on reducing suffering for the people in Syria. We needed to reduce violence. We needed to hold the regime accountable for things that are done and most importantly, from the US perspective, we needed to keep ISIS from reemerging as a threat to our country and to other countries. At the same time, we also realized that there wouldn't be a solution to the crisis until there was a political process under resolution 2254, so in each of these areas, we've seen both progress and challenges, but of course, on ISIS, we have prevented the reemergence of the threat from northeast Syria, and we've helped deal with people that needed to be repatriated out of the prisons, and we dealt with displaced people in al-Hol to reduce the numbers there. We helped provide for stabilization in those parts of Syria.

Question: I want to talk a little bit about the ISIS situation now that the US troops are still there, do you envision a timeline where they will be withdrawn? Because there were some reports in the press that there is a plan from the Biden administration to withdraw.

Answer: Yeah. So right now, our focus is on the mission that we have there to keep ISIS from reemerging. So I know there have been reports, but I want to make clear that we remain committed to the role that we play in that part of Syria, to the partnership that we have with the local forces that we work with, and to the need to prevent that threat from reemerging.

Question: So you can assure people who are saying that you might withdraw, that you are remaining for the time being?

Answer: Yes, and that we remain committed to this mission which needs to continue to be pursued.

Question: You also mentioned the importance of humanitarian aid. The US has been leading on this. Are you satisfied with where you are today on the humanitarian front in Syria?

Answer: We remain committed to the role that we play to provide for humanitarian assistance in Syria. Of the money that was pledged in Brussels, we pledged $593 million just this past spring, and we overall, since the beginning of the conflict, have provided $18 billion both to help the Syrians who are inside of Syria and to help the refugees who are in surrounding countries. And so we remain committed to providing that assistance, and we remain keenly aware that 90% of Syrians are living in poverty right now, and that there's been suffering there. We're doing everything we can to reduce the suffering, but I think where we would really like to be is where there's a larger solution to the whole crisis, so Syrian people someday will be able to provide again for themselves and not need this assistance.

Question: And that's a perfect key to my next question. Solution in Syria. you are aware that the countries in the region are opening up to Assad again, and you also have the EU signaling overture to the Syrian regime and Assad. How do you deal with that?

Answer: For the United States, our policy continues to be that we will not normalize with the regime in Syria until there's been authentic and enduring progress on the goals of resolution 2254, until the human rights of the Syrian people are respected and until they have the civil and human rights that they deserve. We know other countries have engaged with the regime. When those engagements happen, we don't support them, but we remind the countries that are engaged that they should be using their engagements to push forward on the shared international goals under 2254, and that whatever it is that they're doing should be for the sake of improving the situation of the Syrian people.

Question: Let's say that all of the countries decided to talk to Assad, aren’t you worried that the US will be alienated in the process?

Answer: The US will remain true to our own principles and our own policies and our own laws, and the path for the regime in Syria to change its relationship with us is very clear, if they change the behaviors that led to the laws that we have and to the policies that we have, if those behaviors change and the circumstances inside of Syria change, then it's possible to have a different kind of relationship, but that's where it has to start.

Question: My last question to you before you leave, if you have to pick one thing that you need to do in Syria today, what is it that you would like to see happening today?

Answer: So there are a number of things, I think that will always be left and that there are things that we will try to do, to try to make them happen. We want to hold people accountable in Syria for things that have happened. So even today, we observed something called the International Day for victims of enforced disappearances, there are people that are missing, and we're trying to draw attention to the need to account for the missing people. So our step today was to sanction a number of officials who were responsible for enforced disappearances, but we also created something called the independent institution for missing persons, and that helps the families, in the non-political way, get information on what's happened. So I'd like to see some peace for the families of the missing people. I'd like to see the beginning of a political process, there hasn't been a meeting of the constitutional committee in two years, and I think that's because the regime has not been cooperating in political process steps. So we need to change that situation. And I would, of course, like it's important to see the continuation of the things that we were talking about, so keeping ISIS from reemerging and maintaining assistance as necessary in the humanitarian sphere. So all these things, some of them are ongoing, and some of them remain to be achieved. But the Syrian people deserve all aspects of our policy to be fulfilled and for them to be able to return to a normal life.