I explore and interrogate the development and application in Japan--with cross-cultural comparisons--of robotic prosthetic devices that effectively transform disabled persons into cyborgs. Cyborgs or bio-machines, are arguably a type of “social robot.” The impetus for the development of robotic prostheses, and, by extension, the valorization of what I term “cyborg able-ism,” grew out of national and international initiatives, such as the Paralympics, to improve the lives of persons with mobility disabilities of various origins. The majority of prosthetics engineers and manufacturers in Japan create “natural looking” artificial limbs that enable disabled individuals to "pass" as bodies without physical disabilities. However, “natural looking” is not the same as “natural functioning,” and as I argue, prosthetics that most closely duplicate limb and body movements may not look at all like the missing limb(s). My paper focuses on both the anthropological and the phenomenological dimensions of cyborg-ableism. Specifically, I both examine the types of human bodies that are privileged in the discourse of machine-enhanced mobility, and analyze the modes of sociality, and attendant social structures, that robotic devices and prosthetics are imagined to recuperate.
