[4] [Editor's Note: This article was written in May 1996 to document the importance of Netizen ship in Japan. The story it tells is still important as Izumi Aizu's other article in this issue demonstrates.] Emergence of Netizens in Japan and Its Cultural Implications for the Net Society by Izumi Aizu izumi@glocom.ac.jp In Japan, just as in many other countries of the world, the Internet (the Net) has become a popular subject for the business and general press. Despite this interest, few TV programs seriously picked up on the 'culture' of the Net, or of its Netizens. In February 1996, one network designed a program to discuss the future of the Net, by the Netizens, and for the Netizens. The combined use of TV and the Internet highlighted some of the differences in the roles and features of these two very different media. The exchange also suggested new possibilities for mixing the two. Most important, the program presented a dynamic picture of social change in Japan. Netizens And Live TV On February 17, 1996, a Friday evening turning into Saturday morning, past midnight, close to 1:15 A.M., TV Tokyo began the live TV discussion program "What's Going to Happen to the Internet in Japan?" For the next two and one-half hours a panel of 15 experts representing the spectrum of knowledge in Japan about the Internet participated in a spirited discussion. A few meters from the main table were nearly 40 spectators, or Netizens, all avid Internet users. They stood the entire time like a crowd in a British football stadium. One week before the broadcast, an Internet E-mail list was created and nearly 800 participants were polled on their views of how the discussion should be formatted, what issues should be presented, who should be on the panel, and what style of discussion would be most suitable to the TV medium. Few respondents, if any, were specialists in TV production. There are examples where the Internet was used during a TV program to get some input via E-mail or CU-SeeMe to the studio, but this was different. Opening the planning process of a TV program for the public's input via [an Internet] mailing list before it was aired is, as far as I know, the first attempt in the TV production business in Japan. The live TV program was designed to be interactive, yet it was extremely difficult to handle much of the input from the Internet on a real-time basis. A few comments were selected and read from E-mails sent in during the program, but it was not easy to incorporate effectively such external inputs into an ongoing broadcast framework. Rather, the preceding discussion on the [Internet] mail list felt much more constructive in terms of its actual contribution to the program. It gave a greater sense of ‘sharing' the process among the mailing list participants. The real-time interaction had significant constraints. The network planning team released the original production plan to the mailing list. The producers planned to pick-up such themes as "Cyberporn in the Net" including the passage of the CDA (Communication Decency Act) in United States and the citizen protests against it. At the time, it was the hottest topic on the Net around the world. Although some people didn't like the idea of beginning the show with such a "filthy" story, others found it an important cultural and ethical issue. The production people also said they want to pick up Bob Metcalfe's "Internet Catastrophe" article in InfoWorld that pointed out ten reasons why the Internet may collapse during 1996. Among them being: slow and expensive telephone lines, greedy commercial business invasion, and strict content regulations. Several strong opinions against using this pessimistic approach were presented and discussed, leading to a slightly modified original format. The Internet mailing list was named "Netizen-TV," suggesting who were the main actors of the show. The live program was open to the Netizens who wanted to participate, speak out or observe the program on that day. The room was not an ordinary TV studio, it was the main conference room of GLOCOM, a nonprofit research institute in Tokyo with the mission to study and build the next generation of Networked Society. There was a large screen with a T1 connection to the Internet in the conference room. The center panel included: Dr. Shumpei Kumon, expert in social systems study, particularly the networked society and its historic, civilizational context; Mr. Yasuki Hamano, a leading analyst and practitioner in interactive digital media; Mr. Joichi Ito, an Internet evangelist, almost American in his worldview, head of PSI Japan and Eccosys, an Internet service provider; Mr. Hiroyuki Kokubu, a 22 year old entrepreneur specializing in the testing and evaluation of new video games before they appear on the market and who is now forming his own company to enter the broader Internet business arena; Dr. Kazuhiko Nishi, President of ASCII corporation, who originally introduced Microsoft into the Japanese market and who is a strong advocate in personal computing in Japan; Ms. Kaori Sasaki, President of Unicul International, a multi-lingual communications service company, a female entrepreneur who was later invited to a special luncheon with Hillary Rodham Clinton when the U.S. President came to Tokyo in April. They represent a ‘new breed' of Japanese efforts towards the "Information Revolution." First Arrest on Cyberporn in Japan The TV program began by reporting on an incident that occurred just two weeks before. On February 1, two people in Tokyo were investigated by the police because of their illegal distribution of hardcore pornography from their personal Web pages. One defendant was actually a 16-year old German high school student and the other was a 28-year old Japanese businessman. The businessman was arrested the next day and later prosecuted for his illegal redistribution of pornographic pictures taken from newsgroups on the Internet. This was perhaps the first, and is still the only, arrest of its kind in Japan. In Japan, showing or distributing hardcore pornographic pictures in public is definitely against the criminal code, even among adults. There is little room to escape from being sentenced guilty once all the evidence is presented. In Japan, Internet distribution of hardcore pornographic pictures is not unknown. The two individuals in questions, however, were less discrete than others. They used the rental homepage server of an Internet service provider called Bekkoame International that has the largest individual subscriber base among providers in Japan. Bekkoame also became the subject of the police investigation. The police obtained a search warrant from the court and seized all the related E-mail files addressed to the two people as well as the hard disk containing the materials used for the Web server. The police needed the hard evidence. Here, the secrecy and freedom of communication of using E-mail was sacrificed or yielded to the "public interest" of keeping society "clean." The police had received an anonymous tip two months before the arrest. They evidently felt that such activities could not be ignored and wanted to demonstrate that distributing hardcore pornography over the Internet is illegal in Japan. The two "distributors" became the symbolic victims to give a broader warning to the society at large. Immediately after the arrest was reported by the press, many pictures including very legal ones simply disappeared from Web pages and the Net traffic became fairly smooth. Most of the panel members at the TV program were very reluctant to accept the idea of government regulating Internet contents. Nishi suggested some software solution such as an automatic filtering of undesirable pictures to children. Others like Joichi Ito expressed strong concern about government intrusion upon freedom of communication. Special guest Ken'ichi Ozaki, President of Bekkoame, another young entrepreneur, described how ignorant the police were when they came in: they did not even know that a ton of "illegal" material can be easily accessed by merely clicking the button on the Web pages that have links to the many adult-oriented servers outside Japan! To date, few, if any, protests have been made by Japan's Internet users groups or providers. The challenge remaining to the Japanese authorities is not to prove the defendants guilty, but to effectively shut-out pornography from crossing the borders into Japan via the Internet. What is against the law in Japan is, in effect, not illegal in Cyberspace. There is no effective legal or social system, at least at this moment, to constrain these activities beyond one's border. One is left wondering if this incident in Japan indicates that the Net culture is emerging mostly among the American-dominated Western cultural sphere of the globe and the Oriental and other non-Western cultures remain closed within their traditional norms. Does this case reflect a symbolic challenge to our overall, international 20th century modern society? How should we foresee the coming of new culture and new society in a global perspective? What Is A Netizen? To answer these questions, we need to focus on the concept of Netizen. The term "netizen" was first coined by Michael Hauben in 1992 while he was a sophomore at Columbia University in New York City. He had been a very active user of the Net since he was 14. After spending considerable time on his local BBS (bulletin board system) and then with the Usenet community, he became interested in finding the roots of this community of people. Hauben wrote: "What Is a Netizen? In conducting research online to determine people's uses for the global computer communications network (i.e., the Net), I became aware that there was a new social institution developing and I grew excited at the prospects of this new social institution. In response to the excitement I discovered from those who wrote me (and which I also experienced), I felt that the people I was writing about were citizens of the Net. Sometimes people on the Net would call users of the Net, a net.citizen (read net citizen). This idea I transformed into Net Citizen, which in shortened form is Netizen. Netizens are Net Citizens who utilize the Net from their homes, workplaces, schools, libraries, or other locations. These people are among those who populate the Net and make it a human resource." (See, http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/text/WhatIsNetizen.html) Netizens Put Into Historic Context At my research institute GLOCOM, we found Michael Hauben's "Netizen" homepage via the Internet index service Yahoo in late 1994. Dr. Shumpei Kumon, Executive Director of GLOCOM, read Hauben's online papers and added further depth from his own research to the term Netizen. According to Kumon, a Netizen must have some historic roles. Just like the citizens who were the main actors of the social revolutions in France and elsewhere that formed the basis of modern democratic society, the netizens should play a key role in bringing a new social system, using the Net as well as creating the new networked society of the 21st century. This revolution, according to Kumon, is a mixed one. It should be first considered as "the third phase of the Industrial Revolution." It follows the first industrial revolution of the late-18th century that was brought about mainly by steam engines, textile manufacturing, and railways. The second one occurred in the late 19th century, and was fostered by the steel industry, heavy chemical, and electrical industries. He sees the third revolution as "completing" the industrialization of modern society, not creating a new paradigm. At the same time, or perhaps shortly after it is over, a newer and deeper social revolution will also emerge, triggered by the third industrial revolution and its completion, but it will have much deeper consequences. This can be called the "Information Revolution" as the third Social Revolution following the first "Agricultural Revolution" and the second "Industrial Revolution." In this sense, we are preparing for the grand social revolution by producing new actors, that is the Netizens. We, ourselves, may not be fully qualified as the genuine Netizens; our children and their descendants will be the central force of the new civilizational transformation. Whether one is born "b.c. (before computers)" or "a.c. (after computers)" makes a big difference. Likewise, before or after networking will be the most critical difference in carrying out the Information Revolution. What seems to be the cultural gap between Western and Eastern societies, as is shown by the strict police charges in Japan against the Cyberporn or similar tendencies found in Singapore or China, could be regarded as more of the transitional conflict between the 'ancient regime' of our very society and coming 'new regime' initiated by the Netizens. The Netizens will, over time, learn how to build and operate a more comfortable society without disturbing the harmony and dignity of people and their community, be it real or virtual, as well as without loosing the precious value of the Net that includes the true freedom of communication and expression down to the individual end users. Where Do Netizens Emerge From? Where do Netizens emerge from? A tentative answer is "from the grassroots." Let us examine this observation. In Japan, typical grassroots activities by local citizens using computer networks to create a new community movement can be found in quite a few places. One such case is COARA (Compunication of Oita Amateur Research Association, "Compunication" is a composite of computer and communication) which started in May 1985 in Oita, a local prefecture in Kyushu, the western-most island of the Japanese archipelago. COARA was originally planned as a local database service to provide business-related information to local management and business people. Soon they found that it did not work. Not many people showed an interest in getting company profiles or local sightseeing information online – via 300 or 1200 bps text-only one-way communication. A few months after its start, a high school student broke in and found that the small BBS was almost dead. He was close to leaving, but stopped and questioned himself: "The quality of a BBS is defined by its users' activities, and if I am a user then I should contribute something that can interest the others. What can I write that can satisfy these unknown business people?" This student, Masaharu Baba in a few weeks started his monologue "High School Life Series" online. He wrote of his daily life at High School – how lonely the students felt, how distant the teachers were, and one day he even disclosed his bad marks on mid-term examinations. At first senior members of COARA were highly skeptical about the real intention of this strange kid. Then they gradually realized that this is a real person, trying to communicate on a peer-to-peer basis. Some started to send e-mail to him saying "You shouldn't spend too much time online, you better study more for classes." Baba went on to disclose his more personal story, his relationship with his mother, and so on. Six months after he started to write regularly online, he graduated from high school and joined a software company as a programmer. He thanked to the members of COARA as the first people who seriously treated him as "real person" and listened to him. He felt that this was the real kind of education missing in school and he was only able to find it on the Net. Through these and other trials and errors, COARA members found that the fundamental value of using an online network is the ability to communicate with others. The two-way interaction made possible by using computer networks was a real, new means of interaction that these citizens never before had. You can say anything you like at any time; no matter how young you are, male or female, in a professional field or not, crossing many physical and social borders. COARA recognized the importance of this people-to-people, two-way communication early on and shifted their project's direction. In contrast, most of the mainstream experts in Tokyo still believed that Videotext online shopping and database services, all one-way provisions of commercial information or services, would become the core of then "new media." Instead, as COARA began to demonstrate, the citizens became both supplier and user of the information they created and shared. These citizens had started to formulate new kind of social institution, a new community of people, as it began to be called, a "Network Community" in 1987. More than five years have passed and the COARA members started their quest again. This time, under the banner of "hypernetwork society," they looked into the future of the network community or network society as a whole, made possible by the marriage of high speed communications networks and high powered personal computers, now known as "multimedia networks." After several internal debates as well as technical, institutional and financial struggles, COARA was finally able to connect to the global Internet in the summer of 1994. It was one of the very first regional networks to have full IP connectivity outside of the academic and research networks in Japan. In 1994, the World Wide Web was starting to grab everyone's attention. The Japanese Prime Minister's office started its Web homepage in August 1994 and the White House's debued its "Citizens' Interactive Handbook" homepage in October. Yet COARA tried to remain a bit different. In July 1994, COARA's first homepage was opened, with the banner saying "Citizens' Diary." The COARA members wanted to preserve the culture of their two-way, people-to-people communications experiment by using the narrative and casual style of writing and reporting. They did not like the institutionalized and one-way style of some of the Web pages run by serious organizations. For them, online communications should be always casual, frank, and people-oriented. One day some of their members went to the then-Prime Minister Murayama's own small and very humble house in Oita city, took some digital pictures, and put them on the diary homepage. A local policeman came to question these young people, and his picture was also taken and soon put online. Other citizen members started their own individual homepages. It was then aggregated and titled "One Person, One Homepage." The governor of Oita prefecture, Morihiko Hiramatsu is globally well-recognized by his invention of the "One Village One Product" movement to promote local industry from the grassroots. The COARA members brought this same idea to the Internet. Most of their individual homepages still have a strong personal and communicative nature thus giving the reader a sense of belonging to a community. How Netizens Emerge? By observing how the people of COARA behaved, we see that they are quite genuine Netizens. Computers are linked to connect people. The people become open and form a kind of community, an extension of their local community – many COARA members are from outside Oita but feel that COARA is their own home. Nobody really made any strong decision to form a "virtual community" explicitly, but it does firmly exist. It just emerged. It can be safe to say that Netizens and their virtual community emerged through continuous people-to-people discourses online. It is made from the bottom up. At first they didn't set any clear objectives. It was naturally built around self-organizing activities, with a dozen or two (but not more than that) core enthusiastic members, or the Netizens. Some new people join the core while others occasionally leave with various reasons. They enjoy "off-line" meetings most – COARA holds monthly regular meetings and always has a party after. These are typical characteristics of Netizens and their virtual community that exists on the Net. Howard Rheingold's historic book Virtual Community describes well the story of how he met with COARA and witnessed how other cases, such as the WELL (Whole Earth eLectronic Link) in San Francisco Bay Area or BBS groups in England are all so similar in the nature of community building. Language Barrier? A culture is often defined by the language its people use. People then often ask "is the Internet dominated by English?" If so, most Japanese must have difficulty in participating fully with the Net culture. Quite often, a Japanese who doesn't know much about the Internet fears that his or her lack of English skills will make it impossible to use the Net. Globally speaking, it is true that the Internet is as a whole an English-speaking community. Yet, if one looks at it locally, many people are using their own native language on the Net. One of the first things the pioneers of the Net in Japan, such as Jun Murai, did was to create software that can allow people to handle Japanese character codes easily on the Net. Only after making these daily tools available to the majority of local people did the Japanese Net began to grow. In all aspects of life it is very unusual for Japanese to communicate with each other in anything other than their own language, and the Internet is no exception. At least in the domestic sense, language will not become an obstacle to the diffusion of the Net. Unfortunately, there are still people who express the potential danger that the Internet might damage the culture and language of Japan. Of course, one of the great strengths of the Internet is its global connectivity. Here you need to speak a common language and, now, English is by far the most dominant. If Japanese (or any other non-English speaking folks) want to keep up with what is going on in the world, we have no choice but use the language that other people of the world are using. Unlike native English or other Roman-character-based speakers, the Roman alphabet is still very foreign to most Japanese. The distance between English and German or Spanish is much less than that between English and Japanese. In one sense, this is clearly a cultural impediment to Japan's global use of the Internet. Yet there have been at least two occasions in history when Japanese society was determined to learn and master English. The first was in the 1850s, when U.S. Admiral Perry demanded that the samurai-governed, feudal Japan open the country to the world. The second was, of course, when Imperial Japan lost the Second World War in 1945 and the U.S. military forces occupied Japan. Both times the Japanese not only learned the language, but were able to adapt to advances in the world, through hard work and innovative efforts. It was a difficult but rewarding challenge, as history shows. Netizens To Open New Culture The rapid spread of the Internet is not a military occupation nor a cultural invasion. Opening up the country to a networked world does not mean giving up cultural assets. It is, to the contrary, an opportunity to bring Japan's own cultural contributions to the world. It also opens the possibility for badly needed change: perhaps Japan will become a less rigid, more decentralized society, following the network paradigm of the distributed nature of the Internet itself. Like most other countries, today's Netizens in Japan still belong to the minority. They are less than one percent of the whole population. They are more individualistic, better-educated, and have higher incomes than the average. Roughly 90 percent are male, living mostly in urban cities. They love to communicate and they are looking for buddies. Sometimes they take each other too seriously and become arrogant. Yet they like to do things for others, as was shown right after the Kobe Great Earthquake in 1995, when many online volunteers gathered, and tried to help the victims. We know these characters are not unique to the Japanese Netizens at all, but this may have been the first resounding shot, the Bastille Day of the Japanese Information Revolution. In Howard Rheingold's book The Virtual Community, Joichi Ito, a Net pioneer and co-founder of TWICS, one of the first Internet access providers in Japan, is quoted as saying that the widespread use of the Net could change the Japanese system for the first time in thousands of years. Ito thinks it might cause a kind of unprecedented allergic reaction in Japan. No one doubts that Japan may need to go through these "allergic" symptoms, but the results – a truly internationalized Japan literally hard-wired to the world – will be ultimately worthwhile. The Japanese people have traditionally felt that they are isolated geographically, surrounded by the seas, far from the center of the world. Now if you can connect to any other people in the world in relatively effortless, prompt ways, using the Net, then this sense of isolation will, at least over time, fade away. Whether this will or will not really happen is unknown. It is up to the first generation of Netizens in Japan, perhaps together with Netizens in other parts of the world. If any existing cultural force, no matter which one it is, tends to dominate the entire Net world too much, then the anticipated reaction might become very negative, making the world more fragmented, and in each fragmentation will exist stronger central control. Freedom is not given. It only becomes reality through people's efforts and fights. Not all Netizens are born equal, or rather alike. They speak different languages with different geographic and cultural backgrounds. The Net, however, can absorb and preserve these differences without putting them into direct conflict. To keep the diversity and to work together – that is the working principle of the Internet and from which today's Netizens should learn and grow. The world is getting more diverse, thanks to the Internet, and the world is getting closer and closer, again thanks to the network of networks. Both chaos and conflict resolution are possible on tomorrow's Net. ------------------ Izumi Aizu Institute for HyperNetwork Society GLOCOM (Center for Global Communications) International University of Japan Haakusu Roppongi Building, 1F 6-15-21 Roppongi Minato-ku, Tokyo 106 E-mail: izumi@glocom.ac.jp Personal Homepage: http://az.glocom.ac.jp http://www.glocom.ac.jp _____________________ BIBLIOGRAPHY Aizu, Izumi. "The Emergence of Netizens: The Cultural Impact of Network Evolution in Japan," NIRA Review, Fall, 1995. http://www.nira.go.jp/publication/review/95autumn/aizu.html This essay describes how Japan was lagging behind the U.S. in terms of Internet penetration and how Japan has been trying to catch-up, starting around 1994, with some observations of Japanese Internet user profiles, language barrier issues, and concludes that over time the "virtual marathon" will have no winners nor losers. Bressand, Albert. Networld (a private report originally written in English), translated into Japanese by Izumi Aizu, published by Toyo Keizai Shimposha, 1991. Albert Bressand started an independent nonprofit think-tank in Paris in 1985, to explore the emerging societal forces around networking or "Networld." His vision of networking is the combination of human, economic/financial, and technical/computer-wise, with such unique concepts as "Infrastructure" plus "Infostructure" as well as "Infoculture." Kumon, Shumpei and Aizu, Izumi. "Co-emulation: The Case for a Global HyperNetwork Society" in Global Networks. Cambridge: MIT PRESS, 1994. This paper is a chapter in an edited book with more than 20 authors including Mitch Kapor and Howard Rheingold. Each author was given the theme of how global networks will be shaped. Based on Kumon's "co-emulation" theory, Japan can and should try to accommodate the creativeness of Western individualism while still maintaining her traditional cultural assets such as group orientation and team behavior. Aizu introduced one case history of Japan's computer networking community, COARA, a decade-long, local-based grassroots citizens' networking activity. The writing process of this book required all the authors to use Internet mailing lists for mutual discussion. (COARA can be reached at http://www.coara.or.jp) Hauben, Michael. Mr. Hauben first coined the phrase Netizen. He is forming a Neitzen association. In the fall of 1995, Mr. Hauben visited Japan and GLOCOM. His homepage can be found at: http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/ Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control. Addison-Wesley, 1994. This book is about the complexity and the significance of biology to the human culture and society. It is by far, I believe, the best discourse linking the experiences of biology, technology, and computer networking. McGurn, William. "English Rising: Asia's New Language of Opportunity." Cover Story, Far Eastern Economic Review. March 21, 1996. pp.40-44. One of a number of articles appearing in the Western press discussing the rising use of English in international commerce. There have also appeared specific articles on English on the Internet. Rheingold, Howard. Virtual Community. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994 http://www.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/index.html When Howard Rheingold was first invited to Japan, he was asked to give a keynote talk at the first "HyperNetwork Conference" in Oita, home of the COARA citizens' network. After the official program was all over, he joined the COARA members' party where he found so much similarity among the networkers' behavior and relationships with each other and of the WELL, a San Francisco-based networking community. That strange finding led him to write this book Virtual Community. A whole chapter is devoted to the history of computer networking in Japan. This book was translated by Izumi Aizu into Japanese in 1995. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Reprinted from the Amateur Computerist Vol 12 No 2, Spring 2004. The whole issue or a subscription is available for free via email. Send a request to jrh@ais.org or see http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------