Wiring Up Migrant Workers.(Computer Citizenship School for Foreign Workers, Japan)(Brief Article)

It began as a project to help impoverished Brazilian youth. In 1998 Inyaku Tomoya, a development worker in Tokyo, was vacationing in Brazil when he read an article about the Center for the Democratization of Computer Science, the organization founded by Rodrigo Baggio to start computer schools for poor kids. He fired off an e-mail to Baggio expressing interest in his work. A few hours later, the two were sitting in a restaurant talking about poverty and the digital divide. The conversation transformed Tomoya into a warrior against computer illiteracy. Soon after returning home he founded Passo, an aid group that collects used computers, fixes them and ships them off to Baggio's group in Rio de Janeiro. That, he thought, was his contribution to tackling the digital divide.

But then it struck him. Tokyo, with 2 million immigrants, has its very own digital divide. "Migrant workers have no access to information technology," Tomoya says. "They are too busy working in the factory to have a chance to learn computers." The social consequences of computer illiteracy are especially high in Japan because computers have become ubiquitous. Children are presumed to have some knowledge of the Internet before they reach high ...