A visit to almost any government office demonstrates how ill prepared Japan is for the information age. Desks are barely visible under mountains of paper that should have disappeared into data banks long ago. The MPT is online, and other ministries are gradually waking up to the info age. Government regulations, however, remain geared to an era when trees were plentiful and floppy disks unknown. The tax authorities, for example, require all businesses to print out and store their records for seven years.
Business is equally out of step.
In the U.S., where computers and networks were introduced to improve efficiency, corporate restructuring over the past decade swept out entire layers of management, with information technology sometimes helping to fill the gap. The hardest challenge facing Japan in the multimedia sector is exercising the entrepreneurial spirit that has accounted for the success of so many U.S. companies based in a garage with a good idea. Japanese financial markets discriminate in favor of big firms, making it virtually impossible for little start-up firms to find capital. But they are going to suffer because they have no content or commerce to put on the systems. We need a lot more innovation.