One is the active involvement of foreigners. When Shogun Hideyoshi imported new ceramics techniques to Japan at the end of the sixteenth century, he shipped entire villages of Koreans to Japan and settled them in Kyushu. In early Meiji (1868-1900), Japan brought over hundreds of yatoi gaikokujin, "hired foreigners," who designed railroads, factories, schools, and hospitals, and trained tens of thousands of students. Indeed, the very term used by Sapio magazine, sakoku ("closed country"), is an old one, dating to the shogunal edict that closed Japan in the early 1600s; despite the opening in the Meiji period, the tradition never died. After the yatoi gaikokujin served their purpose, the government sent most of them away, and for a good century foreigners have not been permitted to have influence in Japanese society.

In the 1990s, the Ministry of Education forced national universities to dismiss foreign 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 I Ching, 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 was very good at that- One journalist, praising the Japanese for their efficiency in keeping secrets, commented, «Patents are only for a time; a secret is forever.» But in the new economy people don't have time to wait forever. Time moves too fast; today's secret is tomorrow's failed idea. The explosion of software and new Internet technologies bursting out of Silicon Valley has been a collaborative effort in which a young engineer calls up his friend and says, «I have these parts of the puzzle, but I'm missing other parts. What do you think?» His friend listens, supplies another piece, and everyone benefits. In Japan, such free and easy give-and-take is nearly inconceivable. Hobbled by secrecy, new ideas in Japan will continue to come slowly – and in the new economy there is no greater sin than to be slow.

One could say that Japan poses a fascinating challenge to the very idea of the modern state at the start of the twenty-first century. Information – its processing, analysis, collection, and distribution – stands at the core of postindustrial technology. Or does it? Japan has made a big bet otherwise. Wisdom in the West has it that high quantities of precision data and the ability to analyze them are what make banks and investment houses succeed, nuclear power plants run safely, universities function well, archaeologists build up a credible picture of the past, engineers design efficiently, doctors prescribe drugs properly, factories produce safe cars and hygienic milk, and citizens play a responsible role in politics. From that perspective, one would expect that the lack of such information – a preponderance of fuzzy information – would become an increasing liability.

The value of factual data would seem to be only common sense, and for all that traditional Japan valued the ideal above the real, canny merchants in Edo days well understood the importance of keeping their accounts straight. The seventeenth-century novelist Saikaku comments, «I have yet to see the man who can record entries in his ledger any which way or ignore details in his calculations and still make a successful living.» One could argue that the modern Japanese bureaucracy's utter disdain for facts is something new-a tenet from traditional culture that was carried to extremes. It could result from something as simple as the fact that officials got away with it. In Saikaku's day, sloppy accounting soon dragged a shopkeeper into trouble. In present-day Japan, bureaucracies with unlimited funding and no public accountability can hide their mistakes for decades.

Nevertheless, authoritarian leaders in East Asia favor the modern Japanese model of development. They see merit in having the bureaucracy keep information secret and manipulate it for the national good, not letting the public get involved in wasteful disputes over policy. For these leaders, freedom of information is chaotic, controlled information more efficient. Until now, the dialogue on this issue has been carried on between Asian authoritarians and Western liberals largely in political terms: whether people deserve or have a human right to be informed. In Japan's case, it might be helpful to disregard these political aspects for a moment and question whether such control of information really does make government and business more efficient. Those who favor information managed by the bureaucracy assume that while the general public stays in the dark, all-knowing officials will guide the nation with an unerring hand.

For Japan, the results of such a policy are now coming in, and they indicate that, far from being all-knowing, Japan's bureaucracy no longer has a clear understanding of the activities under its control. What we see is officialdom that is confused, lazy, and behind the times, leading to incredible blunders in the management of everything from nuclear plants to drug regimens and pension funds. Until a decade ago, very few people noticed that there was anything going wrong in Japan; rather, the emphasis was on Japan's «efficiency.» It is now becoming possible to see what happens to a nation that develops without the critical ingredient of reliable information.

Much money and millions of words have been spent on the question of whether Japan will catch up with the West in new information industries. But few have even noticed that Japan has a fundamental problem with information itself: it's often lacking and, when it does exist, is fuzzy at its best, bogus at its worst. In this respect, Japan's traditional culture stands squarely at odds with modernity – and the problem will persist. The issue of hidden or falsified information strikes at such deeply rooted social attitudes that the nation may never entirely come to grips with it. Because of this, one may confidently predict that in the coming decades Japan will continue to have trouble digesting new ideas from abroad – and will find it more and more difficult to manage its own increasingly baroque and byzantine internal systems. The nation is in for one long, ongoing stomachache.

For the time being, bureaucrats and foreign academics alike are tiptoeing around embarrassing situations, «as one who steps on dog dung in the dark.» This is comfortable for those in charge, since it relieves them of any urgency to solve Japan's pressing problems. Defaulted bank loans, unemployment, rising national debt, lost plutonium, out-of-date analog television, waste dumps in the countryside, tilting schoolyards, ugly beachfronts, global warming, defective cars, poisonous milk – Japan has them firmly under control. There is just one little problem with this approach. Abraham Lincoln pointed it out once to a delegation that came to the White House urging him to do something he felt wasn't feasible. He asked the members of the delegation, «How many legs will a sheep have if you call the tail a leg?» They answered, «Five.» "You are mistaken," Lincoln said, «for calling a tail a leg don't make it so.»