The Next Stage of the e-Japan Strategy.

(From Journal of Japanese Trade & Industry (JJTI))

Byline: Kokuryo Jiro

The e-Japan Strategy, the pillar of Japan's national information technology (IT) initiatives, is about to enter its second stage. Details of the new strategy, which will be announced by the prime minister's office later in the year, have not yet been decided. We do, however, have some clues based on reports from related government agencies including the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI); and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), in which key concepts such as "ubiquitous" and "platform" are proposed. In a nutshell, the idea is the transition from "stage I," infrastructure building and utilization of the broadband network, to "stage II," the creation of platforms on which knowledge, technologies and new businesses emerge vigorously in a ubiquitous network.

The original e-Japan Strategy was announced in January 2001 after the Basic Law on the Formation of an Advanced Information and Telecommunications Network Society became effective. The move was prompted by a sense of crisis that Japan was perhaps falling behind in the Internet revolution.

To be fair, Japan's IT industry rapidly caught up with the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. The highest performing CPUs, memories and supercomputers were produced in Japan. Such hardware advancement was beginning to help Japanese mainframe vendors to capture markets around the world.

The trend, however, shifted with the rise of personal computers, and most notably in the progress of open architecture systems. Japan's engineering excelled by fine tuning and balance in every detail of systems such as mainframes. Engineers who grew up in such a culture found it difficult to adapt to the idea of building up a system with unbundled hardware, operating system and applications software. Likewise, the idea of packaged software for mainframes and PCs was against the instinct of the engineers, who emphasized reflecting the result of kaizen (improvement) in the operation by customizing every detail of the software to user needs. The Japanese computer manufacturers were slow to respond to the market trend and lost much of the market except in the laptop segment that nevertheless required finely tuned engineering. The final blow was the initial slow start of the Internet. Skepticism toward "best effort" - which means unreliable - technology was stronger in the Japanese IT community (which takes pride in zero defects quality) than in other places in the world. The problem was serious because the weakness was a reflection of the very strength that brought the Japanese IT industry to its prominence. Lack of enthusiasm resulted in the price of (best effort non-time sensitive) Internet service being among the most expensive in the world. Hence the penetration of the Internet was very slow.

The initial IT strategy (the original e-Japan Strategy) addressed the issue head on. The goal was to become the most advanced IT nation in the world in five years. A concrete target was set of connecting 30 million households by broadband networks.