Chinese cheap labor set a Japanese automation back by a couple of decades. Coming into the 90s, Japan was pushing more and more automation as a way to deal with their declining workforce, then China fully opened up in the late 90s and that was history.

For the longest time Chinese made Toyotas were of much lower quality than Japanese ones, simply due to precision robots being used in Japan for work that was being done manually in Chinese factories. Now that China made is also hitting a demographic cliff, one thinks that maybe again automation will take hold…or maybe Africa and India will develop next.