Japan Faces Obstacles on Information Superhighway : Telecommunications: Tokyo plans superior system that links nation. But culture, trade, money are problems.

Management at Kiyoshi Iida’s workplace has urged workers to make the most of the office’s new computer network, including using their personal computers to communicate with each other.

There are a few problems, however.

“My boss has been saying that, with the introduction of a local area network in the office, we should all use the system,” Iida said. “But I tried to send a message to him through the electronic mail, and I found out he was not connected.”

Iida’s experience is significant because of who he is: director of the Technology Development Division of Japan’s Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT). This puts him at the very heart of a Japanese effort to catch up with the United States in building and using an advanced telecommunications infrastructure. Yet Iida is surrounded by evidence of Japan’s lagging position in such key areas as computer networking and cable television.

In recent months, MPT officials have publicly acknowledged that Japan has fallen far behind the United States in areas of information technology destined to be of vital economic importance in the 21st Century. Prodded into action partly by enthusiastic U.S. talk of building an “information superhighway,” the ministry has begun pushing a plan to build an advanced new telecommunications network that would be capable of virtually unlimited transmissions of video, audio and text throughout the country.

Many details of the MPT proposal remain to be worked out. But the goal is clear: to leapfrog past the United States, in effect building a full-fledged information superhighway--not just a narrow access ramp--right up to the door of every home and office in Japan.

The past half-century proves that Japan can play catch-up very well. Time after time, government and industry have, acting in concert, performed brilliantly in carrying out a strategy to dominate certain industrial sectors. For example, Japan came from behind to overtake the United States in color televisions, automobiles and semiconductors.

Success in this case, however, will not be easy. Huge costs are one factor. Regulatory and cultural obstacles are others.

The plan also has become entangled in tough trade negotiations between Japan and the United States. U.S. officials say they are determined that American companies will have fair opportunities to bid for contracts. But Tokyo has not yet given the guarantees that Washington is seeking. The sums of money at stake are enormous.

Under the MPT-backed plan, the Japanese government would provide interest-free loans to help finance construction, by 2010, of a nationwide telecommunications network that would use highly sophisticated optical fibers not only for the main trunk lines, but also to provide the final connections to users. It is this use of optical fibers for direct links to individual homes that would make the completed system the most advanced in the world.

“The preoccupation with fiber in the home is to make sure the whole country is pulling together,” explained G. Russell Pipe, an American telecommunications specialist with Virginia-based TDRS Inc., who was recently in Tokyo for a Japan-U.S. information infrastructure symposium. “The Japanese are kind of perfectionist. They want a common base. They want to be ahead, as a country. . . . If Japan could get its whole act together, they would be ahead of everybody else. That’s seemingly what they’re talking about.”

Optical fiber cables are in many ways an ideal technology for telecommunications. A single strand of optical fiber, thinner than a human hair, can carry as much information as 16,000 copper wires. The main drawback is the expense of manufacture and installation.

MPT estimates the cost of the 15-year construction project at $320 billion to $515 billion, depending on the network’s level of sophistication, with an additional $408 billion required if the cable is to be laid underground rather than strung from poles.

The fiber optics plan was officially recommended in late May by the Telecommunications Council, an influential advisory board reporting to the ministry. Under the proposal, which has the active support of MPT officials, much of the cost would be covered by interest-free government loans, but private companies would also invest in the project.

A combination of private firms and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT), the primarily government-owned company that currently provides many core telecommunications services, would handle the construction. NTT is already using its own funds to expand its optical-fiber trunk lines.

It remains uncertain, however, whether the powerful bureaucrats at the Ministry of Finance will support such massive government expenditures.

If the money is made available, Japan’s top-down approach to creating a new telecommunications infrastructure could offer some important advantages over the United States’ patchwork approach.

The American vision is less costly, at least in the short run. Americans foresee a system of high-capacity trunk connections with such means as optical-fiber cable as the “superhighway.” Less expensive technology, such as existing telephone and cable television lines, would provide “on-ramp” access for homes and offices.

While America’s effort to encourage competition among cable and phone companies will spur innovation, it will also lead to a plethora of incompatible systems that must later be knit together at substantial cost.

The emphasis on open competition among a variety of providers should help hold down charges to consumers, but it also means America could end up with two high-capacity broad-band wires to some homes and none to others, widening the gap between haves and have-nots.

Quality could also vary from region to region as it does today with cable. There will be a tendency to save money in some areas by making do with low-capacity copper wires that are already in place.

By contrast, Japan’s system will be designed with a single standard to work together as well in video as it does today for telephone service. As a government-backed project, the system will reach every corner of the country, providing a basic utility much like electricity.

Since high-capacity fiber would go right up to each home, all regular network television programs could be offered over the system, freeing up broadcast bands for other uses. By linking every home in the country with high-capacity lines, this kind of network could also provide an almost ideal environment for the growth of multimedia services, in which data, video and audio materials can be provided to users on demand.

This is important to international trade, in part because unless Japanese electronics and computer firms can engage in domestic multimedia business at the technological cutting edge, they are likely always to be a step or two behind international competitors.

The United States is currently considered far ahead of Japan in its information infrastructure because Americans enjoy much greater access to cable television, wider use of personal computers and much more linkage of personal computers in networks.

In the United States, 52% of personal computers are connected to local networks such as office E-mail systems and databases, while the comparable figure in Japan is only 8.6%, Iida said.

The Ministry of International Trade and Industry reported last year that only 270 computer databases existed in Japan, compared with 6,300 in the United States. The Japanese had 28,000 passwords, a rough measure of the total number of database users, compared to 2.3 million passwords in use by Americans.

Japanese citizens are far behind Americans in obtaining access to the Internet, the world’s most important computer network, which links smaller networks to provide tremendous access to databases and E-mail service.

Language is a significant barrier because use of the Internet requires advanced knowledge of English. The typical Japanese college graduate has studied English for 10 years but hasn’t really mastered it.

The Internet simply poses too great a challenge for most Japanese, said Yoshio Utsumi, director general of MPT’s international affairs department.

“You have to go through the manual very carefully,” he said. “If you push one wrong key, you’re not connected. Then when you reach the Internet, the first word you see is ‘Log in’ in English.”

In trying to find access to Internet databases, he added, many Japanese are figuratively “blinded” by English instructions.

There also are serious language-related problems even when Japanese is used for computer-network communications within Japan.

The language uses thousands of ideographic characters adopted from Chinese that simply cannot be typed on a keyboard as easily as Roman letters. Software has been developed to make this process easier, but mastering this skill is still far more of a challenge than learning to type English.

Partly as a result, typing is still seen here as a clerical task, rather than an essential skill for all managers. In most Japanese offices, it is only the less powerful people who might have computers or word processors on their desks.

Handwritten memos continue to play a much greater role in Japanese business than they do in the United States. With facsimile machines now ubiquitous, many Japanese managers see little incentive for use of computer messages. Sending a handwritten fax seems much quicker and easier.

Japan’s rigid workplace social hierarchy is another factor inhibiting use of computer networks for in-company communication. A boss might feel socially comfortable sending computer messages to subordinates, Utsumi said, but there would be much greater hesitation by a subordinate about sending ideas or requests to a boss by computer. In Japanese society, such matters call for a face-to-face conversation.

The layout of crowded Japanese offices also facilitates direct contact. Most employees work in large rooms, with dozens, or even hundreds of desks squeezed into all available space. Middle-level managers usually work elbow to elbow with their subordinates, rather than in offices of their own.

Left on its own, Japan would not necessarily develop sophisticated networks of computer communications, Utsumi said. But globalization of the world’s economy is leaving it no choice. Japan must not only build a better network at home, but also make greater use of international networks, he said.

“I personally tend to believe we should create our own Japanese system with the Japanese language,” Utsumi explained. “But after all, Japanese is a minority language. English is spoken by a lot more people. So we have to use that system, however inefficient it might be. We are destined--doomed--to be part of that system.”

The Telecommunications Council, in recommending massive investment in optical fiber, predicted that doing so would open the door to growth of a huge new sector of Japan’s economy. Building the network would provide the environment for growth of a $1.2-trillion annual multimedia market and employment of 2.4 million workers, it predicted.

The goal may border on the grandiose, the time frame may prove overly ambitious and the obstacles are considerable. But Washington is treating Japan’s optical-fiber network project as an extremely important business opportunity for U.S. firms.

“We’re studying this plan in detail,” a U.S. trade official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We would expect procurements under the plan that’s been announced by MPT, a good size of those procurements, to be covered under the agreement that we’re negotiating now.”

Times staff writer Leslie Helm in Seattle contributed to this report.