Manifestation of the Dead in Dolls Imitating the Deceased

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the living (bereaved family) recognizes the dead through two dolls "Iningyo" and "Omokage dolls" that imitate the deceased. As a framework to grasp the relationship between the dead and the non-living, the non-human and the living, Keiji Iwata's animism theory and actor-network theory were used as auxiliary lines.<br> In analyzing the interviews, the narratives were divided into three themes: (1) the healing structure of the doll, (2) the difference between the physicality and the remains of the doll, and (3) the "space" of the doll and the deceased AI.<br> In the discussion, how the dead appear in the "space" of the dolls in the 3rd analysis theme was discussed by referring to the method of object recognition called "manifestation" from the theory of Nagatani (2009), which discussed two animism theories of Tyler and Iwata.<br> In addition, as a future issue, we referred to Okada (2012)'s concept of "weak robots" as a clue to consider what kind of approach is effective in realizing the composition of "manifestation" using state-of-the-art technologies such as VR and AI, and focused on the common point of "subtraction design" of weak robots and dolls imitating the deceased, and considered the representation of the future dead.