On the day that Merit Janow and I had coffee on the terrace of the Oriental Hotel back in 1996 and the idea for this book first came to me, the thing that struck us most forcefully at the time was the vibrant international life in Bangkok – the Germans, Chinese, Japanese, Americans, and Thai intermingling in business and social life-and the lack of anything like this in Japan. No country is as obsessed as Japan with the word international ; you will find it used as a name for everything from hotels to taxis to soap, and you can hardly get through a single hour in Japan without reading, hearing, or saying international at least once. Yet few modern nations have erected such high barriers against foreign people and ideas.

Japanese and foreign commentators take it as a commonplace that with time Japan is becoming steadily more international. But it could be said that Japan is headed in the opposite direction-back to a quiet form of isolation. The doors to real access to Japan remain firmly closed to foreigners; meanwhile, young Japanese men and women with talent and an international mind-set are leaving their country. This emigration has been going on for a long time, but it picked up pace in the 1990s.

Indeed, escapees from Japan's rigid internal systems have been going abroad since the nineteenth century. Often, they are from disadvantaged backgrounds and have suffered disapproval from their families and from institutions in Japan. When they succeed abroad, they are lionized as heroes at home, after which they can return and engage in activities they could not have initiated within Japan. This is how it was with Fukuzawa Yukichi (1834-1901), the father of modern education, and with Ozawa Seiji in the 1960s, who moved to America after Japan's leading orchestra, sponsored by the national broadcasting company NHK, went on strike against him and refused to play. Ozawa Seiji is one of a number of prominent artists to base themselves abroad. Others include the musician Sakamoto Ryuichi, the composer of the score for the film The Last Emperor; Ishioka Eiko, who won an Academy Award for her costume design in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula; and Senju Hiroshi, the painter whose Waterfall installation won a prize for the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1995. All of these artists live in New York.

The trend continues. Son Masayoshi, often called Japan's Bill Gates, was born the son of Korean immigrants, a minority group that suffers social ostracism, much of it officially sanctioned. «Being of Korean background, I thought as a child that things might be pretty hard,» Son says. So while still in school he moved to the United States. By the time he went to the University of California at Berkeley, he was already a successful young entrepreneur; he made a million dollars in his early twenties when he sold a pocket-translator invention to the Sharp Corporation. «In the United States, people come from all over the world, all races, all backgrounds,» Son says. «And they're all doing what they want, many scoring huge successes. When I saw that, I became more open. It freed my soul.»

In the early 1980s, Son returned to Japan and founded Softbank, which in one decade grew into Japan's largest software distributor and publisher of computer-related magazines. Winning the right to use his Korean last name took longer (naturalized citizens cannot use their foreign names but must choose from a list of officially accepted Japanese names), but he achieved that feat in 1993, after an extended struggle with the immigration authorities. Today, Son is the golden boy of Japanese information technology and is frequently in the news as he buys up software and information businesses around the world.

While the phenomenon of escapees from Japan is an old one, there is a significant difference between the situation in the late Edo-Meiji period and conditions today. Japan at the turn of the century was a poor, backward nation struggling to throw off centuries of feudal stagnation. It was not free politically, and few Japanese spoke a foreign language or had much experience of the outside world. For educated people, the only way to acquire necessary skills was by going abroad, and it was only natural for farmers and manual laborers to try to escape poverty by immigrating to Hawaii or Brazil.

But Japan is now a free democracy, has few overt controls over the media, and is famed for its high technology. All Japanese study English as children in grade school, and tens of millions of them have traveled abroad. In addition, Japan is rich. It is a situation verging on the incredible that modern Japanese would lack access to up-to-date information or business opportunities within Japan. And yet the flow of refugees continues.

It begins with doctors. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, have more than 350 Japanese doctors in residence at any one time. Each doctor represents the department of a certain hospital in Japan, and when his three-year term is over, his department sends a replacement, a system that has gone on for decades. The reason is that basic research in Japan is understaffed, weakened by bureaucratic inertia, and limited by a lack of freely shared and reliable data.

Not all of these doctors return to Japan. Many of the brightest and most innovative remain in the United States. Dr. Kakere Ken, a specialist in cancer cell division, has been at NIH since 1967. «The reason I stayed at NIH is because I could freely pursue basic research [here],» Dr. Kakere says. «Creative work is valued in American medical research. In Japan, I could only have researched in one narrow category. Also, in [Japanese] institutions, with their vertical hierarchies, there is little exchange between people-this is another difference from America.»

Doctors have symbolic importance because they exemplify the process by which Japan learns from the West. During the Edo period, medicine alone was officially sanctioned as a field of foreign study; scholars flocked to Nagasaki to learn skills from the Chinese and the Dutch. One could say that medicine is the only truly indispensable modern technology. Many of us might enjoy taking a journey to the past for the experience of living with candles and traveling by horseback, but who would be willing to forgo modern medical treatment? From that point of view, medicine is the queen of technology, and it was indeed the only thing from the West that premodern Japan really wanted. Therefore it is all the more surprising that today, nearly one hundred and fifty years since Commodore Perry arrived, medical advances still do not originate in Japan; they continue to come from the West, and Japanese doctors continue to flee to the West and stay there. As one Japanese newspaper put it, «In the field of basic research, human exchange between Japan and America is basically a one-way street-Japan absorbs knowledge from the United States.» Dr. Kimura Shikiko, a woman doctor who has been with the NIH since 1987, says, «The appeal [of an American career] is that whether you are a woman or a foreigner, you will be able to pursue your research based on the merits of your work.» In Japan's medical world, young people, women, the outspoken, and the inventive stand no chance of recognition.

The problems afflicting medicine apply to advanced technology in general. Consider Nakamura Shuji, the inventor of important breakthroughs in blue lasers, the Holy Grail of the consumer-electronics industry. Blue lasers allow for far greater data storage and for images much superior to those available today, but nobody had been able to produce a sustained beam of blue laser light until 1999, when Nakamura developed one that beams light for up to ten thousand hours. His employer, Nichia Chemical, now leases the technology to the electronics giant Pioneer; this may be one of the finest achievements of postwar Japanese technology.

So what happened to Nakamura? Not only was he not rewarded or promoted (he earned $100 each for his five hundred patents in the 1990s) but when he decided to leave Nichia, no Japanese company even made him an offer. He attributes this to the fact that he graduated from a minor university and worked at a small firm in the provinces. In February 2000, he therefore took a job as a researcher at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He says, «No bonus, no big position. This is a Japanese company. So I go to the U.S.A.»

Another example of how hard it is for independent-minded inventors or entrepreneurs to get ahead in Japan is Okabe Nobuya, who runs a company that makes science-fiction effects for movies and television. He invented a program that allows games makers to vary the background scenery on the screen, but he could not interest Japanese manufacturers. «Japan is like the army with everyone in senior-junior relationships,» he says. «But it's not manly to stick around complaining, so I'm finding my own solution.» He took his program to a convention in San Diego and soon had multiple orders. Okabe has since moved most of his company to Hollywood.

Meanwhile, JETRO (Japan External Trade Organization) has set up a fund called Tiger's Gate 2000 to nurture young Internet entrepreneurs in Japan. However, the condition of JETRO's support is that the young tigers move to the United States and learn how to do business there. Okabe sells software in the United States because he cannot find buyers at home; JETRO actually requires that young Internet start-ups leave the country! Such are Japan's up-and-coming entrepreneurs: their success depends on the degree to which they avoid Japan. This is true even for Son Masayoshi, whose high-tech acquisitions were garnered largely in the United States, not Japan. The source of Son's leveraged money has been Japan, but the growth areas of his business are abroad.

It isn't only individuals who are fleeing Japan but businesses as well. The most celebrated example is Honda Motors, which in the 1980s quietly transferred its base of operations from Japan to the United States, which now accounts for more than half of Honda's production and sales. Honda expects exports from Japan to continue to fall in the coming years and is betting the company's survival on cutting loose from Japan.

Hundreds, even thousands of companies are slowly but surely moving their base of operations abroad. This is why Sony was willing to take massive losses in Hollywood (more than $2.5 billion) when it purchased Columbia Pictures: there would be no purpose in buying or developing Japanese movie studios, since the Japanese movie industry has almost completely collapsed. Sony's only way forward was to expand in the United States.