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[* Here's the article referred to in my previous posts. --Dave McLane *]

Will Japan Jack In?

by John Perry Barlow

October, 1992 Electronic Frontier column 
Communications of the ACM

I am writing this column in a large aluminum tube somewhere over the
Pacific Ocean, halfway between El Camino Real and the Ginza. A airliner
over the gulf which separates the two parallel universes of the United
States and Japan is probably the right "place" to think about culture on
the electronic frontier. This is about as virtual an experience as one can
have and bring his body along. 

There are no landmarks anywhere in this viewshed. The cabin is
darkened so the other (mostly Japanese) passengers can watch the
American movie, but when I raise the shade and peer below, the sea is
featureless and vast as the Net. 

The design aesthetics inside this aircraft are classic Generican...
as culturally inert as possible. Like most modern American corporate
designers, be they decorating Marriotts or the Friendly Skies, the
folks who picked these earth tones wished to offend no one, whether
American, Japanese or Martian. It's as odorless and colorless as
ascii, but it is this very aspect of it, the intentional absence of
cultural content, which makes it both so perfectly American and so
much in keeping with the rest of the Information Age. 

When I first became conscious of the existance of Cyberspace, it
didn't immediately dawn on me what an American place...one might
even say colony...it is. 

An American myself, I didn't find it strange that the Virtual World,
from the televised sit-com barrens of the Global Suburbs to the
linear vectors of international air traffic control to the Net
itself, is a landscape where American English is the lingua franca
and American "culture" dominates to the point of invisibility. As
McLuhan once observed, "We don't know who it was that discovered
water, but we're pretty sure it wasn't a fish."

That this should be the case is not surprising. In addition to being
the being birthplace of both telephony and the Internet, America has
always had a fascination with blank slates, an impulse to form
itself unhindered on the conceptual map rather than adapt to the
physical requrements of the landscape. 

My first sense that there might be something parochial about my
model of the Datasphere arrived not long after the Electronic
Frontier Foundation began to make itself known on the Net. 

At first, we presented outselves as an organization which primarily
intended to assure the application of the First Amendment to digital
media. I got a plaintive piece of e-mail from what was still the
Soviet Union saying, in effect, "That's all very good, but what
about us?" More of the same followed from such precincts as Canada
and the United Kingdom. I realized that I had always thought...
incorrectly...there was something inherently free about the English
language. 

Since then, we have placed less emphasis on the easily revised
assurances of local law and more on promoting the more robust and
natural protections provided by an architecture for Cyberspace which
is commercially and technically open, ubiquitous, redundant, and
cheap. 

But, as I am now discovering, there are other barriers to jacking in
which all the fiber, coax, RJ-11 outlets, and sensible rate
structures in the world aren't going to overcome immediately. It may
be that the most obdurate of these is cultural immune response. 

Subtler questions arise. I mean, our aspirations to assure freedom
of speech sound noble enough to our own American ears or even
recently Soviet sensibilities, but this plane is about to land on an
island where dwell millions of people for many of whom freedom of
speech is a puzzling irrelevancy. 

A Japanese magazine recently requested reprint and translation
rights on an essay of mine which deals in part with person's right
to speak his or her mind. They are trying to find someone to write
an introduction which will attend to the trickier task of cultural
translation. As one of their editors told me, "You are preaching the
freedom of individuals, but that concept really doesn't exist here,
constitutionally or otherwise."

By which I don't mean to suggest that Japan is not a "free country"
in our terms. But the very word "free" may mean something profoundly
different in a society which is in collective agreement, not due to
the imposed ideological will of a despotic bureaucracy, but because
they, well...agree. 

I sense some restlessness with that agreement in certain surprising
precincts of Japanese society. At a conference on globally networked
computing in Oita Prefecture in February, I was astonished to hear a
number of Japanese corporate officials, apparently orderly as
soldiers in their blue pinstripes, proclaim enthusiastically the
potential of the "Hypernetwork" (as they call Cyberspace) to
tenderize the hierarchical rigidity of both own organizations and
Japanese society. 

It was a little disorienting. Imagine an IBM vice-president with his
fist thrust passionately in the air and you'll get the idea,

But it occurred to me that, if they are right, no organism with an
immune system as subtle and robust as that of the larger,
unindividuated Japanese whole is going to admit without response a
virus which promises to attack its structural integrity. And not
without cause. This is, after all, a society which is also largely
free of such artifacts of individuality as random and violent crime.
It is a society which works to the satisfaction of most of its
constuents who might be expected to ask, "Why fix it? It ain't
broke."

Perhaps if there were other persuasive reasons for Japan to jack
into the Net, they might be willing to tolerate the deconstructive
risks of networked computing. But why would people whose language is
written, not typed, be eager to enter an environment where they
would have to express themselves in the hard little alphanumerics of
lower ascii? In fact, the recently developed Kanji keyboard does
make it possible for the Japanese to input their data with something
besides a calligraphy brush. 

Why would a people who speak very little English be eager to enter a
place where little else is spoken? Why would a people who have shown
themselves to resistant to the global cultural blender of American
culture eagerly enter a place as thoroughly American as Cyberspace
is today? 

Then there is the most fundamental question: why would a society so
deeply interlaced with ancient and completely de-bugged human
networks want a cranky new one of our design? 
 
That there are no ready answers to these questions probably accounts
for the scarcity, relative to population and technological
sophistication, of Japanese Internet connections and a subdued
market for high-speed data links in general. Unless one counts fax
traffic, little of what passes through Japan's wires is digital. The
best estimates I can get from several different sources indicate
only about five to ten percent of Japan's 10 million personal
computers are connected to a modem. Of these, about 200,000 are
subscribers to NEC's PCvan. NiftyServe also has about 200,000
subscribers, but it's thought that many of these are the same
people. 

NEC is very committed to changing all this and one sees its
billboards everywhere extolling "C&C", it's trademarked Romanji icon
for computers and communications. Unfortunately, NEC's beliefs in
the future of this market are not shared by the institution which
must provide much of the infrastructure for that connection, the
Nippon Telephone and Telegraph Company, the stately bureaucracy
which does the phone in Japans. 

When I spoke with Koichiro Hayashi, NTT's vice president of Leased
Line Services (now head of NTT America), he told me there were only
about 12,500 ISDN hook-ups in Japan (as of February of this year).
When I asked him why this was, he said he couldn't imagine a general
market for ISDN. His beliefs had a cultural basis. 

"What about telecommuting?" I asked. Many of the office workers in
Tokyo spend up to four hours every day in the middle of the most
hellish commute imaginable. Wouldn't it be better if they could only
come into the office a couple of days a week? "Japanese will never
accept working in the home," he said. 

He went on to point out that being part of the group is something
which requires direct physical proximity with one's fellow workers.
(There are neither individual offices nor even divided cubicles in
Japanese white collar environments.) He didn't say so, but he also
inferred that managers wouldn't accept a system where they couldn't
watch their workers all the time. 

He also said that fewer than 5 percent of Japan's lines are digitally
switched and thus ISDN ready, a figure which NTT feels no compelling
justification for changing any time soon. Again, its reasons are cultural.
NTT feels a sense of familial responsbility to the 70,000 telephone
operators who jobs would be endangered by converson to digital
switches. They figure there is neither a market now, nor on the horizon,
which would justifiy laying off any of those operators.

This might change fairly soon. The same renegade managers who
welcome networked computing labor in organizations which are busily
trying to provide technological answers to the questions asked above.
They are hard at work on their own pen-based interfaces and Kanji
character-recognition systems. These will shortly make computers
usable to the vast majority of Japanese who understandably find the
Kanji keyboard an unacceptable kludge. 

They have also embraced multmedia (or New Media, as the Newspeak
commissars at Apple have now decreed it be called) and Virtual
Reality with considerably greater enthusiasm than their American
counterparts.  As the cognitive bandwidth of Cyberspace fattens from
text into video, sound and 3-D Garoud-rendered body puppets, we can
expect to see a Japanese interest both in computing and digital
communications which will reveal our current lead in these fields to
be less a matter of our superiority than their disinterest. 

At that point, we might might see some stiffening of our own
cultural immune response systems. 

More and more American commerce is in"soft" products... media,
content, works of the mind. Whether actual software, digitized
Hollywood films, the latest bestsellers, rock 'n' roll, dirty
pictures, inside dope, you name it, if it can be turned into ones
and zeros, it will be. 

Once digitized, information is free to slip from the old physical
"bottles" to which we have always attached our protective marks and
into its natural home, Cyberspace. Online, it will be as hard to own
or contain as air.  Harder, in fact, since, unlike air, digitized
data is infinitely reproducable and malleable. 

As things stand, practically the only protection which can be
afforded soft products is the cultural willingness of people to pay
for them. Contrast the American software market (where at least some
percentage of the users feel ethically bound to pay for the stuff)
with the market in Europe (where almost no one does) and you get
some sense of how important conscience becomes when enforcement
becomes impractical. 

For all of their recent self-protective patent-filing, the ownership
of ideas is as culturally alien to the Asian conceptial frame as the
ownership of real estate was to the Sioux. It just doesn't seem to
make sense to them.  (Possibly because it may not make sense, but
that's a topic for another column...)

Are we really going to want to share Cyberspace with cultures don't
feel morally bound by our concepts of property, especially if those
concepts are backed neither by workable laws, nor clearly defined
jurisdictions to pass them, nor realistic means of enforcing
anything which did get passed? 

Then there is the matter of paying for Cyberspace itself. In the
past, this wasn't a problem. There were only a couple of ways to
ship a bit from here to there. You could use the phone system or the
Internet. 

The phone companies, public or private, owned the phones and that
which connected. They knew what they had and how much it cost to
keep it up. They knew how many users there were, how much they used
it, and, with a little basic arithmetic and some horse trading with
the Public Utilities Commission, how much to charge for carrying
your data across the country. 

The Internet was always a something of an anarchy, created and
maintained from the bottom largely by volunteers with a little help
from the Military Industrial Complex up top, but it was too small to
cost much and too unimportant to raise many alarms as it grew in
complexity beyond anyone's mapping abilities. 

More to the point, digtal communication tended to stay either within
the confines of the a country or a company. Either way, it was
pretty clear who set the fares, who paid them, and who was using
what service. 

These days, the Internet extends around the globe, and is too
important to rely entirely on grad students and an underfunded arm
of the American government, the National Science Foundation.
Besides, there's a lot of money to be made. 

Now, any entity which can propagate a signal is lining up to get
rich in the info transport racket. The Net floats in an increasingly
baffling web of heterogeneous connections: the suddenly bidirectonal
coax of cable TV providers, optical fiber owned by railroad lines,
microwaves bounced from surplus Soviet satellites, packets from
amateur radios, the whole mess woven and tangled into an impossible
spagetti of chaotic unaccountability. 

When I finish this column and dispatch it from the Roppongi section
of Tokyo to ACM headquarters on west 42nd Street, will consist of
about a hundred thousand voltage shifts. No one will nor could know
all the wires, waves, hard disks, central processors, earth
stations, and light tubes will convey them there. No one will know
who owns all these various media nor how to pay each of them a fair
toll for this column's way. 

Somehow, it all works, by grace and spit, but one wonders how long
it can continue to do so before differences between such rigid,
centralized organizational approaches as Japan's NTT will be
culturally incompatible with the increasingly incomprehensible
ecosystem of American telecommuncations. 

Will it be possible for companies like Sprint or PSI to enter Japan
to simply pull an end run around NTT and get provide high speed
packet switched service? (I saw an advertisment for SprintLink in
the Japan Times this morning.) Will other indigenous Japanese
digital service providers arise? Will NTT suddenly recognize the
economic potential of connected computing? 

It all adds up to this: digitally connecting the two most most
advanced technology bases in the world is not going to be an easy or
straight-forward process. Getting Japan jacked into the Net in any
useful sense may take years. Until they can overcome their cultural
aversions to this evironment we may find America all hooked up with
nowhere to go. 

It's kind of like an updated version of the old Koan: what is the
sound of one modem handshaking? 

Tokyo, Japan
Thursday, July 30, 1992