Dogs and Demons   ::   Керр Алекс

Mired in bureaucratic inertia, Japanese schools have been very slow to update the curriculum: in 1994, a Ministry of Education survey found that two-thirds of Japan's public-school teachers could not operate computers, and matters had improved only very slowly by the end of the decade. In late 1998, Japan ranked fifteenth in the world for Internet users per capita, falling far below the United States and some European nations, and lagging behind Hong Kong, Korea, and Singapore. It is one of the curious and unexpected twists of modern times that Japan, thought to be enamored of advanced science, has been so slow to embrace the new world of information technology – for most of the 1990s, it positively spurned it.

The reasons for this curious twist are many, including overpricing (Internet fees far higher than those in the United States or Hong Kong), overregulation, and fear on the part of conservative-minded leaders who foresee that the individualistic Internet threatens Japan's social cohesiveness. «It is true that multimedia will offer surprising advantages in some fields,» an editorial in Asahi Shimbun said in October 1994. But it warned, «It is, however, still a wild card to our society as a whole. We should not be in a hurry.»

And, indeed, Japan has not been in a hurry. The sluggish growth of its economy in the 1990s is ample proof of this. American entrepreneurs built huge businesses centered on information technology over recent decades: an Apple, a Microsoft, a Netscape, an Oracle, an Amazon.com – nothing like these developed in Japan. The two leading Japanese software developers, Ascii and Justsystem, are tiny in comparison with their American competitors, and both of them are bleeding red ink as Microsoft gobbles up the Japanese market. Justsystem's main product, a word-processing software called Ichitaro, maintained 80 percent of the domestic market until 1996, but by 1998 that percentage had fallen to 40 percent and was dropping rapidly.

Japan, however, must do what the rest of the world does, especially if it involves industry-and this means that sooner or later the Internet is coming to Japan. As the millennium turned, there were signs that Internet-based businesses had at last begun to prosper in Japan, with Yahoo! Japan stock rising to stratospheric heights and numerous government programs aiming to encourage entrepreneurs. But, for Japanese industry in general, change will not come easily, for workers fear to suggest new ideas lest the group ostracize them. The patterns of ijime extend deeply into corporate life. When Dr.