Things that can be done with the Internet

 NPO “CANVAS” and Google opened a web site that gathers nice stories involving children and the internet. Young people from Japan, the U.S., England, Germany, China, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, Australia, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Thailand, Malaysia and Pakistan all took part. 　http://withnet.co/ 　We wanted to concentrate on activities that promoted creativity and expressiveness. One result was the creation of this site. For more details please see the site, but I’d like to present some examples here. 　 Ayane Naoi (17)  Naoi studied...

Read More

Let’s tend to the computerization of education

  I gave the following presentation at a diet meeting on the computerization of education.  Some say that the computerization of education will cost money. I say let’s spend it. According to the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), Japan is in the lowest rank when it comes to education spending as a percentage of GDP. We aren’t spending enough. If we spend 10,000 yen on totally 10,000,000 children then the cost will be 100 billion yen. That represents 1/100th of the road budget. It’s a small price to...

Read More

The troublesome era of mixed media

4K TVs are selling. They have four times as many pixels as high-vision sets. In other words, I think that they look four times as good. I thought that terrestrial digital broadcasts already look perfectly fine, but it seems that greed was not yet exhausted.  We want prettier and larger screens. One of our walls has become a place for a large TV. They are selling even though 4K digital broadcasts are still in the future. So what shall we view on them? Videos from the net. It’s more of a large PC than a television.   In the US it’s...

Read More

Raising international manga artists

 A foreign manga festival was held at the Tokyo Big Site. I was employed as a consultant.   There was a panel on international manga education. The theme was raising international manga artists. I’ll summarize what I said in the beginning:   Japan is a manga paradise. Manga represent 64% of all published materials and 20% of all book sales. In Germany this figure is 1.6% and in France it’s 0.4%, so 20% is quite an outlier. Most of the anime that have become popular overseas have manga at their base. Manga are at the...

Read More

Discussing the Content Policy with Lawmakers

I was called to a content committee meeting with members of the diet to debate pop culture and Cool Japan. Here are the answers that I gave. Q. How do you view the competitive power of Korea? A. Korea’s strategy is clear. Since the administration of Kim Dae-jung, 1) Their strategy fuses content and home electronics, software and hardware. 2) Their strategy concentrates on the international marketplace. 3) Their strategy involves intense government support. Japan has a lot to learn from their strategy. Q. What should we do to enter foreign...

Read More

International Debate：What does the Net produce? (Part 2)

 These are the questions that I was asked regarding the influence that the internet would have on society at the Stanford Trans-Asian Dialogue. Q. What about the influence on Japan, China and Korea? A. In regards to the territorial disputes, the net can serve to add fuel to the fire and to act as a breeder reactor for patriots. On the other hand, fans of Japanese anime, manga and games also increase in China and Korea as a result of the internet.  When the Senkaku dispute was flaring up I spoke to students in the doctoral program...

Read More