No one wants to clean s#it, especially in a country with as broad a social welfare net as Japan.

Instead, in Japan you can get someone from Vietnam, China, or Thailand to do that for a couple dollars a day with Gulf style guestworker rules.

Additionally, Asian societies don't have the same Luddite aversion to automation [0] that seems to have taken over Western mindshare as can be seen on HN.

They don't want Westerners nor are they opposed to Dirigiste style industrial policies that help build a public-private social safety net by commercializing and deploying automation.

Who do you think SoftBank and MUFG's largest LP's are lol.

Edit: can't reply

> I'd highly recommend watching Perfect Day by Wim Wenders. It's a really sweet film

It is! But for every Hirayama there are dozens of ASEAN and Chinese migrant workers doing menial work as part of the JETRO Trainee guest worker program.

> NYC sanitation dept...

Sanitation Engineers aren't janitors.

Janitors, fish cleaners, farmworkers, bricklayers, service staff, and other low and unskilled work is what is being supplemented by foreign workers and depending on the job by automation.

> So your argument might hold for other countries, but not for Japan. Cleaning is a pretty honorable thing to do there

What's with this kind of orientalism?!?

Japan's Labor Ministry literally has a strategy around hiring foreigners for cleaning and janitorial services [1] due to persistent labor shortages.

And if we want to go that route of shallow orientalist sterotypes, Japan is also a society where whether you or not you attended a 旧帝一工 or Ivy, whether you have a Government or big corporate job, and whether you will be able to afford a house and have kids by 35 matters. There's a reason Japan's birth rate crisis is overwhelmingly impacting the lower tier of Japanese society [2].

[0] - https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-aro...

[1] - https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/11130500/001567071.pdf

[2] - https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2024/04/10/the-socioeconomic...

In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants