The Japanese Internet : visionaries and virtual democracy

An examination is made of how the development of the Internet in Japan is likely to affect civic rights and the relationship between citizens and their government. This was undertaken to determine if the trajectory of Internet development in Japan, with its distinct locational and corporate biases, has followed the predictions of two prominent Japanese commentators: the visionary Kumon Shumpei who espoused an expansive international perspective that citizens will be transformed into 'netizens' in a virtual community; and the media analyst Kogawa Tetsuo, whose pessimistic views were targeted primarily at a national audience and concerned the adaptability of the Japanese to the 'permanent autonomous zones' created by information technology. The observations of these commentators on the relationship between the Internet and civil society are tested in an examination of the degree to which the social and political uses of the Internet have followed their conjectures by means of two case studies: the protest movements over United States bases in Okinawa, and the Nibutani Dam in southern Hokkaido—an area with a predominantly indigenous Ainu population. Although the authors report evidence that the Internet has extended the sphere of grassroots political activity, they believe its effect is likely to be limited until there is a restructuring of Japanese political organisations and attitudes. The spread of computers and factory automation from the late 1960s to the early 1970s was greeted with immense excitement by the Japanese government and by many Japanese academics and journalists. Committees of bureaucrats produced Utopian documents presenting this as the dawn of a profound technological, social, and cultural transformation in which Japan would play the leading role. Reports by the Economic Planning Agency and by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry's Industrial Structure Council depicted the world as being on the brink of a revolution which would be as far reaching in its implications as the agricultural and industrial revolutions had been. The spread of automation and computer networks, it was argued, would not only result in great gains in productive efficiency, but would also bring about radical changes in leisure, family life, social relationships, and human values. The newly emerging 'information society', successor to the industrial society of the 19th and early 20th centuries, was depicted as a world where "human relations will be transformed, and instead of competing with and restricting others, better relationships will be established through synergic voluntary cooperation" (SPB, 1983, page 51). In …