In September, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori pledged to make his country the world's information technology leader by 2005. IT would drive economic recovery by improving Japan's competitiveness, he said.
Achieving that goal won't be easy.
Mr Mori had sent his first e-mail only three months earlier, and acknowledges that Japan has fallen behind the United States, Singapore and others in IT adoption. A third of Japanese homes have internet connections, compared with more than half the homes in the US.
Critics largely blame the poor uptake of the new technology on the market dominance of Japan's former state monopoly Nippon Telegraph & Telephone, which still controls 99 per cent of the country's telephone lines.
NTT enjoys strong support from bureaucrats in the Telecoms Ministry and, despite a reduction in connection fees triggered by competition from start-ups, its charges remain high. Mr Mori's answer, an IT strategy called e-Japan, will be introduced this month.
E-Japan promises to break up NTT if it does not reduce its market dominance. The plan, which has a budget of $US16.7 billion, includes tax incentives for laying high-speed fibre optical cable and high-speed internet connections to schools, and $US2.8 billion in vouchers for 30 million people to attend IT courses.
Architects of the strategy envisage attracting up to 30,000 foreign IT specialists to work in Japan, introducing electronic payment of taxes by 2003, training teachers in personal computing and changing laws to encourage electronic commerce.
Toshihiko Kinoshita, professor of commerce at Waseda University, says Japan's free trade agreement with Singapore, due to be concluded this year, promises to improve infrastructure efficiencies in Japan by standardising such things as e-commerce transactions. But Professor Kinoshita says comparing Japan's IT performance with Singapore and the US is misleading. Singapore's small size meant that it could be efficiently wired for IT. Japan is not only geographically more challenging, but has an ageing IT infrastructure. Japan is competitive in the manufacture of IT devices such as digital cameras, and its mobile phone technology is more advanced than that of the US or Europe.
But cutting-edge technology is not everything.
Japan discovered this when its products were locked out of Asia by inferior European GSM technology.
It was then that Japan learned the importance of securing international acceptance for its communications standards, says Professor Kinoshita.
Now NTT DoCoMo's popular i-mode mobile phones, which use packet-switching technology to connect to the internet, are set to shake up the staid Northern Hemisphere competition.
NTT hopes to develop a market presence through a combination of alliances with European and US partners and composite mobile phones which can use existing GSM technology. Third-generation DoCoMo mobile phones, able to display moving images, are due on the market within months.
Japan is keen to stir things up in Asia too.
At last year's G8 summit, in Okinawa, Japan committed itself to helping overcome the growing digital divide between the region's high-tech leaders and countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma and Laos, which are lagging behind.
Japan has earmarked up to $US20 billion to help the less advanced countries build their IT infrastructure and develop human resources.
Having spent $US80 billion to shore up regional economies after the Asian crisis of 1998, the desire to foster regional stability by closing the technology gap is understandable. How best to do it is less clear.
For one thing, most countries have privatised telecom and internet companies, which makes it hard for a foreign government to act directly.
Then there is the question of what to do about entrenched monopolies. In many cases, removing them would result in a proliferation of small, weak companies.
Japan also lacks expertise in vital areas such as programming. But if President John F. Kennedy could set the outrageous goal of landing someone on the moon by the end of the 1960s, surely the 21st century's second biggest economy can steer its way around such hurdles and find time to do some rewiring at home.
* Vaughan Yarwood can be contacted at hiero@ihug.co.nz
<i>Asia view:</i> Mori vows to land on his own digital moon by 2005
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