| Toru Maegawa Director, Security Center Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan (IPA) |
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| Toru Maegawa Director, Security Center Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan (IPA) |
On the morning of March 8, 1999, FEN reported the death of Stanley Kubrick, an Academy Award winning movie director as I was on my way to work. He was 70 and the cause of his death wasn't made public. The newscaster mentioned "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (1964), "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), and "Clockwork Orange" (1971) as his masterpieces. They were all very popular films, but "2001: A Space Odyssey" was the most impressive to me because I studied information engineering at university.
I recalled this imaginative movie when I entertained a high-performance computer project delegation from OECD's Information and Communications Policy Committee as an official of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) on July 22, 1992. The commission was formed to study the status of the most advanced projects concerning communications technologies in the United States, Europe and Japan as the OECD had been stirred into action by the commencement of the US HPCC (High Performance Computing and Communications) Project in 1991. Unluckily, I was appointed to manager of the Information, Computer and Communications Policy Planning Office of the Electronics Policy Division of the Machinery and Information Industries Bureau of MITI on June 23, one month before the delegation was to visit, and assigned to an international liaison of the RWCP and contact for OECD. During a briefing for the OECD group about the overall RWCP in a meeting room on the 17th floor of the ministry building, the image of HAL 9000, the computer and a key character of the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," suddenly sprang to mind.
HAL 9000 started running on January 12, 1997 (it was in 1992 in the movie). The computer could recognize human speech, have meaningful conversation with people, read lip movement and was a tough chess player. Although it was thought to be infallible, HAL 9000 killed some people because it was troubled with an inconsistent instruction. An astronaut named Dave cut the computer's circuit.
Perhaps my choice of a computer which appeared in a film, especially one that rebelled against humans, was unsuitable for describing the vision or target computer of the RWC Project. However, the OECD group understood that the RWCP was not planning to develop a computer with the same high-speed calculating capability as the US HPCC Project.
In the summer of 1994, just two years after the briefing for the OECD delegation, I was in New York and working on a report on the HPCC Project. Some people related to RWCP may remember this report because "Denshi Kogyo Geppo," the monthly journal of the Japan Electronic Industry Development Association, carried it.*1 At that time, I was the director of the Industrial Electronics Division of the JETRO New York Center and a New York liaison for the Japan Electronic Industry Development Association. So, one of my important responsibilities was to prepare reports on the US information industry and US government policies relating to information technologies and send them back to Japan.
In the early summer of 1994, I read the 1995 HPCC Action Plan which I'd obtained from a source close to the US government and found some rather important matters.*2 Until that time, I'd thought it was a research and development project for ultra-high-speed computers for scientific and technological purposes and related networking technologies. In fact, however, the HPCC covered a wide range of subjects, including virtual reality, 3-D imaging, natural language processing, development of MOSAIC (a well-known hyper-media tool for the use on the Internet), applied mathematical topics (such as chaos theory), development of electronic library models and next-generation EDI (electronic data interchange) for online commercial transactions. For example, ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency) of the Department of Defense (currently called DARPA: Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) was conducting research on a man-machine interface for more intuitive computer operations as well as studying learning methods for understanding natural languages (oral and written). NSF (National Science Foundation) was working on knowledge-base systems, comprehension of conversation, and input methods for human speech. After realizing the entire picture of the HPCC, I reviewed the differences between the US project and the RWC project that I had explained to the OECD delegation in the summer of 1992.
I swiftly prepared a report on the HPCC Project and sent it by international courier to MITI and by e-mail to other parties concerned.
During the three years I was in New York, I regularly made reports focusing on the latest trends and changes of the US information industry and e-mailed them to my friends and acquaintances in Japan. Since I didn't place any restrictions on the redistribution of the reports and the subscriber base grew without my realizing it. It was already called "The Maegawa Report" when I realized, and some websites were storing the data from my reports. The Electrotechnical Laboratory's site was one of these and started storing the report from early on. New Koala in Oita and ECOM joined later. In particular, Mr. Minoru Yokotsuka of the Japan Information Processing Development Center (JIPDEC) created a complete archive of the information, and there is a link to it from the RWCP's website.*3 As information technology is rapidly progressing, I'm afraid that my monthly "Maegawa Reports" from New York are probably out of date now, but please take a look at the data if you're interested.
When a reporter from Nikkei BP asked me about my job at a preview meeting for Interop'94 Japan held on June 23, 1993 in Tokyo, I immediately replied "I'm an Internet watcher." The reporter seemed surprised at my unexpected answer, and ever since I've called myself an "Internet watcher." My first encounter with the Internet took place through my work at RWCP.
As mentioned already, I was assigned to work as a liaison of RWCP for researchers abroad when I was transferred to the Machinery and Information Industries Bureau of MITI in June 1992. One of my responsibilities was to establish an international network for RWCP activities. To promote the RWC Project, a dedicated network was necessary between the Tsukuba Research Center and RWC partner laboratories in other countries. The Internet would serve as a base of the planned network, but I didn't know much about the Internet then. I learned the basics of the Internet from Dr. Shuichi Tashiro, who had been dispatched from the Electrotechnical Laboratory to the Industrial Electronics Division of MITI. Dr. Tashiro introduced me to various professors and scholars including Prof. Haruhisa Ishida, Prof. Jun Murai and Prof. Shigeki Goto. I was fascinated by the Internet and have been a net freak ever since.
I was given an Internet account probably in the fall or winter of 1992 after the RWCP network was started because I needed it for my assignment. It was an astonishing experience to be able to easily retrieve information from US sites by gopher and anonymous ftp. But the most useful Internet function for my job was E-mail.
At that time, I frequently exchanged opinions with American counterparts regarding how best to conduct the US-Japan Joint Optoelectronics Project, a cooperative initiative that was part of the RWC Project.*4 E-mail greatly helped those trans-Pacific discussions.
Every morning, I opened my mailbox and collected e-mails from the United States. I forwarded them to all people concerned by e-mail and asked for their comments. I collected their opinions (and sometimes ironed out differences) and sent them back to America. The next morning, I would find replies from our US counterparts in my mailbox. Though somewhat simplified, our discussions proceeded like this and the action plan for JOP was thus compiled. Without e-mail, the negotiations would have taken much longer. The Internet was an invaluable tool for us, and this personal experience made me certain that the Internet would become another form of communications following the telephone and fax.
Incidentally, the JOP action plan was signed by US and Japanese representatives on April 25, 1994. The US delegate was Mr. French of NIST, under the Department of Commerce, and I was the Japanese signatory. The day after the signing, I was transferred to JETRO on loan and boarded an airplane for New York on May 2.
*1 "A Report from New York - HPCC Project" appeared serially in the August to October issues of "Denshi Kogyo Geppo (Electronic Industry Monthly Journal)" in 1994.
*2 The CIC Project has taken over the HPCC Project. Its action plan is open to the public on the website. For details of the action plan and other documents, see http://www.hpcc.gov/pubs/.
*3 See http://www.rwcp.or.jp/people/yokotuka/home-j.html.
*4 For more information on the US-Japan Joint Optoelectronics Project, see http://www.oitda.or.jp/jop-j.html.