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teachers, including those who had been in Japan a long time, and to hire new teachers from abroad only on short-term contracts. Foreigners who had lived in Japan for a decade or more, who could speak the language, and who were familiar with local issues could presumably teach their students dangerous foreign knowledge. This policy is still in force as Japan enters the twenty-first century. Even so, academia is wide open compared with medicine, law, and other skilled professions. No foreign architect of stature, such as I. M. Pei, resides in Japan. Foreign architects come to Japan on short-term contracts, erect a skyscraper or a museum, and then leave. But subtle and sophisticated approaches to services and design – the core elements of modern building technology-cannot be transmitted in this way. Japan is left with the empty shells of architectural ideas, the hardware without the software.

The second requirement for making use of information is a hungry public. As taught in the ancient Chinese classic IChing, the symbol of education is a claw over an egg: the parent taps on the egg from outside at the same moment that the chick pecks from the inside. In Japan, the chick is not pecking. In order for a business or a government agency to use information, the people in charge must realize they need it. But, soothed by the reassuring voice of Hal, surprisingly few executives recognize that their businesses or agencies are in a state of crisis.

The third requirement is a solid statistical base. New data make sense only if they stand upon solid old information. For example, foreign dioxin studies can be useful only if the Environment Agency has done its homework and knows which neighborhoods are contaminated and to what degree. Lacking this information, once you've brought in the foreign studies there is little you can do with them. It made sense for Hideyoshi to bring Korean potters to Japan because there was a demand for Korean pottery. Not so for much of the information Japan receives from abroad today. What use, for example, does Japan have for number-crunching techniques developed by trading houses in New York when the numbers that Japanes companies put in their financial statements are largely fictional.

This attitude toward information has proved to be an obstacle to Japanese use of the Internet. Log on to the Interne home pages of important Japanese entities and you will find few meager pages, as poor in quality as in quantity, consisting mostly of slogans. From university home pages, for example you would never get a clue to any serious data, such as Tokyo University's budget, Keio University's assets, the makeup of the faculty, a cross section of the student body, and so forth, only «What Our University Stands For.» Most serious information about these schools is secret, not available in any medium, much less on the Internet. In the end, you would find it difficult – perhaps even impossible – to put your hand on any practical information about these universities. In doing research for this book, I have found a striking contrast between the availability of information in Japan and in the United States an Europe. Visit the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Web site, for example, and you will find yourself deluged with so many pages of data that you can hardly process it. Japan's Construction Ministry and the River Bureau provide a few pages of slogans, and some dead links.

As of summer 2000, both the Tokyo and Osaka stock exchange sites failed to offer any information of substance (for example, the value of new or secondary listings) and did not even have something so rudimentary as a ticker with current index levels. By contrast, the Singapore exchange's Web page was light-years ahead. The failure of the Internet to bring openness to Japan bodes ill for the nation's future. Take, for example, the concept of «industrial secrecy.» In the old manufacturing economy, it was in every company's interest to patent its techniques or, even better, to lock them up in a vault and keep them absolutely hidden from outsiders. And Japan