Form of Government: Japan is a parliamentary democracy with an elected Parliament and a Prime Minister who serves as head of the particular political party.

Who's In Charge: The Japanese Internet infrastructure backbone is in flux: NTT (Nippon Telephone and Telegraph) had been a government monopoly provider, much in the model of the European States. In accordance with international agreements, the Japanese telecomm market is being opened to competition. In August 1998, the American Internet Service Provider (ISP) PSINet acquired three Tokyo-based ISPs to form what is now PSINet Japan. However, on the electronic commerce side, the Japanese Government Ministry that has backed many of the substantial Japanese research studies has announced a two-year study/pilot on ways to facilitate online commerce. That is balanced against the fact that Japan's online population is quite inline with its advanced industrial base: 10.1 million as of February 1998, according to the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications White Book for 1998. This represents nearly double the figure for December 1996 which was 5.1 million. More than half of the Japanese online population (5.5 million) access the Internet from work, while roughly a quarter (2.5 million) access from home and almost another quarter (2.1 million) have access at work and at home. Another good indication of how lively the Japanese online community is are the number of people coming on to look at specific sites: the top three search engines in Japanese (Yahoo Japan, goo, and Infoseek Japan) taken together represent 12.8 million page views per day. The top general news site is Asahi's (English version) and that receives 1.1 million page views per day, and the top PC/Internet news-related site is ZDNet Japan (run by SoftBank) with one million page views per day. Figures for more specific content, entertainment and sports are lower, but the Japanese version of the GeoCities online community also receives 1.5 million page views per day. Numbers like that have significance because they show a very varied use of the Internet from search engine to general news to computer/Internet news to a specific online Japanese language community site (and these numbers do not include Japanese participation in IRC-Internet Relay Chat-channels, whether in Japanese, or other languages).

Although some Japanese online users have indicated that there are adult sites that are reachable only through proxies, there is no formal censorship in Japan. In context of adult media, there has, until very recently been a situation where, although nudity was acceptable, explicit depiction of genitalia was not, and violence was confined to genre areas in movies and other media (a particular kind of comic book, the Japanese name is mangia, was known for explicit violence and sometimes more graphical sexual depiction). However, on October 23, 1998, the Japan Times reported that a National Police Agency committee had submitted a proposal to label so-called adult sites, for content relating to sex, violence and "other harmful information." The labeling is to be worked out by a group that will have members from various industry and public sector groups. That would be inline with the consensus mode that Japanese society often uses to deal with public issues. However, it raises the specter of a kind of censorship by consensus. Japan is by far not the only country to have proposed a labeling solution to Internet content and it is not the only democracy that works on a consensus basis. The question of whether or not labeling online information will constitute censorship in and of itself has to be addressed in both theoretical and technical areas. If the advisory committee that is to come up with the guidelines is actually open and transparent both to the Japanese online community and the larger world community, the discussion and debate could be both useful and illuminating. However, for the discussion to be transparent to the world cyber community, it cannot be conducted only in Japanese, and here is exactly where the example needs to be set. What the Japanese decide does not only effect Japanese online users: if sites are labeled for content, the labeling will not be restricted to only sites on Japanese servers, that would be pointless. But for the world community to know, it must be comprehensible to the world community, and there is no one universal language. Even within language groups like Chinese, there are different methods of encoding for online use so the question of how to make any debate that could impact the world online community transparent is not an easy one. A start could be something that the United Nations is implementing at present, that all UN documents must be made available in the six official languages of the United Nations: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic. This does not completely solve the question of worldwide transparency, but it is a first step that a nation like Japan can easily afford.

The question of labeling site content and whether it can be used to censor material is also not an easy one, but the precedents provide ample reason for being cautious. In the Western countries it was not, until recently, unusual to find that various religious groups would put out advisories on films or works of literature. Outside the West, that practice continues in other countries. Often what is banned does not really pertain to anything overtly having to do with religion so much as it has to do with societal taboos or opposing secular viewpoints. That is why the debate in Japan could be so illuminating, because religion in Japan is already in the domain of the personal and private. In countries where there are more fundamentalist and active groups, it is less of a leap to see how labeling could be used as a tool to silence or marginalize unpopular speech. In fact, given the ability to use filtering systems like PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection), it is imaginable that a political movement could simply provide its members with browsers that would try to filter out any "unapproved" material. Labeling site content is right along the edge of the slippery slope to censorship. It doesn't have to be used in that way, but it easily could be used in that way.

Much depends on how and where the labeling occurs. If an individual configures a browser, personally, say to block off all sites relating to professional sports, since that is not a topic of interest to him/her, then as long as it is one person making the decision for him/herself, there is no censorship possible. But if a school principal or administrator doesn't like professional sports and decides that it is undesirable for any student to be interested in them and has software installed in the school computers that will block all access to any professional sports or related web site then that is censorship. So it is possible to make a distinction by using the paradigm of how closely to the individual level a decision to have access to certain information has been made. At the individual level it should be considered a choice (unless there are known coercive factors). Above the individual level, any decision made as to how to label content has to be carefully examined for who made that decision, how representative they are of a particular online community and the more general, global online community and what are the practical consequences, again both locally and worldwide. John Donne's phrase, "no man is an island," is of particular importance here. Japan is an island nation, with a language not widely spoken outside its territory. But decisions and developments in Japan may be looked at as precedent in other nations, so the labeling site content, which will recur again and again, has particular importance.

Strangely, what may prove to be a much larger issue in terms of the availability and access to information may come not from anything like labeling of sites for content but from one of the areas usually cited as a weapon against censorship: technological advancement. Technological advancement has been the 800 lb. Gorilla sitting astride any attempt to restrict the flow of information-block the land lines and there are mobile phones, take over the coaxial cables and there are satellite dishes. Each advance in the short history from what we may now call the beginning of the Information Age has meant less control of information was possible.

Someone working with NHK, the Japanese public television broadcasting network, first posed the problem: "The Japanese are very fond of miniature devices, right now there are small hand-held units that really can do nothing much but send/receive 200 characters of email, but they do it very cheaply and they are quite popular." This small device is just using the Internet as an efficient way of delivering an extremely limited amount of information. In itself there is nothing sinister about it. But positing it in a society that wants to be connected, but not too connected, and it takes on a different potential. Sooner or later smaller web browsers will be available, and, if they are locked to only certain Internet sites, as some of the advertising kiosks in Hong Kong, or, alternately, if software such as PICS, is being run upstream from the individual unit, these single function devices could be the answer to a would-be despot's prayer anywhere. This is an area that has really not been thoroughly examined, because the countervailing assumption that technology works against the restriction of information flow is the dominant paradigm. And that is precisely why this question is so disturbing, because it suggests that there are two possible lines of development, not one. Yet both are being powered by the same pace of development. There is nothing that suggests this has yet been attempted anywhere in the world or is even being contemplated, but technological possibilities often become technological means to potentially catastrophic ends. Just as there are now several international groups that are examining how to deal with various international issues in areas like such as commerce and governing law, there should be some close scrutiny of the development and utilization of limited function devices that are utilizing only a small portion of the Internet with the rest of it being blocked out by lack of functionality (e.g. only email but not Internet browsing) or with content selection being locked in (in the case of a wireless Internet browsing situation that is locked to certain sites or has a filter upstream from it).

There is real irony in this possibility having been raised in Japan because the Japanese online community is quite lively. The site check was conducted at the Click On Internet Café in Shibuya-Ku, Tokyo on October 18, 1998 (Legend: (+) = was accessible and (-) = not accessible):

CNN (+)
ABC (+)
MSNBC (+)
DowJones (+)
Nasdaq (+)
Amnesty International (+)
Planned Parenthood (+)
Playboy (+)
Penthouse (+)
Jennycam.com (now known as Jenny's Playhouse, a hard core adult site) (+)
Thule.org (a political site leaning towards overt fascist sympathies) (+)