japanamerica

[Running a little late with the updates owing to travel and, well, life.] Japan struggles to give up floppy disks and fax machines for the digital age KYODO When Kono Taro was tapped in August to lead the government’s one-year-old Digital Agency, dedicated to digitizing Japan’s bureaucracy, headlines lit up with his opening salvos. No more fax machines! Out with floppy disks! His proclamations, delivered via Twitter, elicited cheers overseas. Inside Japan, they were met with muted bemusement.  Fluent in English and dubbed a “maverick” by the global media, the former foreign affairs and defense minister Kono is Japan’s most visible and Twitter-friendly politician ever, in a country more typically known for faceless bureaucrats. (When Yoshitaka Sakurada, the 72-year-old cybersecurity minister for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games shamelessly said that he had never once used a computer, his confession was greeted by shock and embarrassment. Though he was promptly forced to resign, no one r...

[I broke my shoulder a couple of months ago and that slowed output considerably. Am on the mend now.] Japan once led global tech innovation. How did it fall so behind? When I first moved to Japan in the late 1990s, Japan’s technological achievements were envied. In 2001, at a book launch in New York, I recorded a video of fellow revelers on my Japanese cell phone. The model had just been released: a squared-off clamshell of sparkly maroon plastic, with an impressive color screen and emoji-like graphics. I emailed the video instantly to publishing friends in Tokyo, which was then home to the world’s second-fastest internet speeds. They responded just a few minutes later, flashing victory signs. My friends in New York cooed as if we’d just watched a new moon landing. But almost exactly twenty years later, vast regions of Japan’s digital universe are stuck in the early aughts. Online banking, airline booking, major newspapers, you name it: Services that have been streamlined by the digita...