In this essay, we reevaluate the 2019 outbreak of a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) from the perspective of multispecies entanglements. It is argued that anthropogenic alterations in the biosphere will most likely accelerate the rate of multispecies pandemics in the Anthropocene. Using a textual analysis approach of anthropological and historical sources on the example of coronaviruses and live animal markets in China, we trace how the virosphere of wild animals from tropical regions comes into contact with the virosphere of humans and farmed animals in highly industrialized landscapes. We suggest that adopting a multispecies perspective on viruses can allow them to be understood as living processes that interact with other species in a realm called the virosphere. The rate at which novel infectious diseases are transmitted by bacteria and viruses has increased in recent decades. We argue that this is caused by side effects of the Anthropocene, such as deforestation, the surge in population growth and density, and anthropogenic climate change, which give rise to an increased number of unusual encounters between humans, nonhuman companion species, and wild animals. In this way, the virospheres of host organisms, which were formerly partly isolated, are allowed to converge and freely exchange infectious diseases, leading to a more homogenized virosphere. As anthropogenic alterations are set to continue in the future, we suggest that multispecies pandemics will likely increase in the following decades.

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In this article, I explore what motivates Japanese women to pursue professional careers in today’s neoliberal economy and how they reconfigure notions of selfhood while doing so. I ask why and how one fourth of Japanese women stay on a career track, often against considerable odds, while the other three fourths drop out of the workforce. Employment trends indicate that more white-collar professional women are breaking through the “glass ceiling” and more women are now filling managerial posts. These trends have been supported by the recession, which has led to the liberalization of career paths that fit with women’s tendencies to engage in short-term and part-time work. Through snowball sampling, I carried out in-depth interviews with thirty-eight women in their forties for eighteen months (between 2007 and 2010), and I conducted follow-up interviews with a selected group of these women (between 2014 and 2018). The women in this group had been in their careers long enough to be able to look back on their professional and private experiences. As I show in this article, the forties appear to be a turning point, because this age represents their first opportunity to take the time to reflect on their careers and to redress the imbalance between their professional and private lives.

Japan is a hyper-aging society, and its government is encouraging robotic solutions to address elder care labor shortage. Therefore, authorities have adopted an agenda of introducing social robots. However, increasing numbers of people in Japan are becoming emotionally attached to anthropomorphic machines, and their introduction into elder care may thus be perceived as contentious. By exploring human engagement with social robots in the care context, this paper argues that rapid technological advances in the twenty-first century will see robots achieve some level of agency, contributing to human society by carving out unique roles for themselves and by bonding with humans. Nevertheless, the questions remain of whether there should be a difference between humans attributing agency to a being and those beings having the inherent ability to produce agency and how we might understand that difference if unable to access the minds of other humans, let alone nonhumans, some of which are not even alive in the classical sense. Using the example of an interaction between an elderly woman and a social robot, we engage with these questions; discuss linguistic, attributed, and inherent agencies; and suggest that a processual type of agency might be most appropriate for understanding human-robot interaction.

The elder population in Japan is increasing drastically, causing a number of issues that have not yet surfaced in most Western countries. Demographic data from Japan reveal that the Japanese have the longest lifespan globally, resulting in the world’s highest population of older adults. Concurrently, the country has a rapidly declining birth rate. As the population ages, the workforce is shrinking and leaving a high number of elders with fewer caregivers to meet their needs. At present, the Japanese government is developing robotic care solutions to overcome the elder care labor shortage and implementing a new agenda to introduce social robots into the field. This article discusses professional women in Japan and their burden of caring for aging relatives and how introducing robotic care devices might reduce current anxieties regarding the provision of elder care. It analyzes the elder care strategies of 12 white-collar professional women in their forties and fifties and examines the extent to which gendered, expected at-home caregiving affects their professional commitments and associated anxieties. The findings below provide crucial insight into the most effective strategies that can be used by Japanese women to balance their careers with responsibilities to care for older relatives, particularly when it is impossible to predict the intensity of caregiving in the future.