January Junket to Japan
A Japanese IT Company
My picture of Japanese workplaces is that which I have seen in
films and television programs, mostly about regular businesses.
I was interested to see whether that image is accurate and whether
it applies to the new information technology sector.
Our hosts in Japan are a relatively new company, established in 1990.
They do information technology research,
produce educational programming for television and video,
and provide computer training to the physically handicapped
that enables them be productive members of society.
KSK has benefitted from the Japan's attempts to restoke
the nation's economic engine through government spending,
acquiring a state-of-the-art multimedia studio in the process.
They recently had the honour of a visit from one of the
Imperial Family princesses.
A Work Place
As it turned out, the KSK workplace wasn't that different from
what I have seen in Japanese films and television programs.
The office is "open concept", one big room with the manager's desk
at one end. No partitions or cubicles. Everyone was wearing suits.
While in the office, they exchanged the suit jacket for a company
golf-style jacket. The young women served guests tea (or, in our case,
coffee -- perhaps just for Americans?). The atmosphere was very quiet
and serious, no joking around -- definitely a Work Place. It seemed
most people just stared at their computer monitor all day. About the
only difference from a regular Japanese company was that most of the
employees were in their early twenties and one had long hair. A far cry
from what I have heard about tradition-breaking North American IT
companies, where anything goes in terms of dress and behaviour.
Building Relations
We were taken around to meet various people involved in medical education
in Kumamoto, with mixed results. A professor at the medical school
(one of Japan's oldest -- schools, that is) responded to Dr. Hersh's
explanation of the
Japanese MeSH software by showing us
his Japanese-English Dorland's Medical Dictionary, an impressively thick tome.
"What you have made has already been done," he declared matter-of-factly.
(We could have pointed out that the software is more portable,
kills fewer trees, can be updated and added to without having to publish
a new edition, and links reliably and accurately to relevant content
on the Internet.) Another professor surprised us by saying that
the English language proficiency of Japanese medical students and
doctors is poor (we had been told it is good), and that they would
thus have little use for the software. (We could have pointed out that
the students could learn English medical terminology from the software.)
We asked if students were being taught how to use the worldwide
knowledge available on the Internet. He said that they use the Internet,
but mostly resources in Japanese.
"Japan, a developing country in terms of information, is about to repeat the mistake it
made in the Pacific War, which was to attach no importance to information.
Japan has not learned from the historical fact that it lagged behind the United
States in terms of information, beginning with code-breaking and ending with
the introduction of radar, and that that was one of the reasons for its defeat."
-- Yasuhiko Shibata, senior fellow, Yomiuri Research Institute (Yomiuri Shimbun, 23 Feb 2000)
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We were better received at a medical technologist college,
where the professor recognized that the software could
provide a link to online teaching material, such as images.
She also suggested there would be interest if the software
were adapted to link Chinese and Japanese medical terms.
In Japan, as elsewhere in the world, people vary in their ability
to see the potential of the Internet.
At the meeting of the Senior Citizens Support Media Consortium,
the members offered some useful comments for improvement and future
development of the software, such as simplifying the output and somehow linking
medical terminology to relevant medical device and drug names.
As KSK president and Consortium chair Mr. Adachi said in his closing
remarks, the Internet puts America and Japan in the same dohyo
(sumo ring),
and there are many possibilities for future collaboration.
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