Western Vs. Oriental Robots

“People building social robots in the West and in Japan are interested in ending up with two very different types of machines. Western robots are engineered to more explicitly express emotion, while those from Japan are generally as expressive as the masks worn by actors in traditional Japanese Noh plays.” “Western culture prizes independent people, while in Japan the focus is on interdependence. People in independence-prizing cultures identify themselves as entirely separate from others, both in thought and deed. They want to change their environment. Members of interdependent cultures aren’t out to change the environment, but to work within it and fit into an existing social world.”