Rising Internet Use Quietly Transforms Way Japanese Live

May 14, 2000 - Ina, Japan -- The Ohara Farm seems pretty much like any other family-owned farm here, small in scale, neat as a pin and dreamily bucolic, surrounded by the magnificent mountains of central Japan.
But its most distinguishing feature is less obvious. The farm is selling its feisty, free-range chickens online.

Kaku Kurita for The New York Times Rei Kimura, holding two of the chickens he raises on the Ohara Farm in Ina, Japan, uses the Internet to introduce his product directly to customers over the World Wide Web.

The Ohara Farm's Web site is the most frequently visited "shop" at Rakuten, an online bazaar that features dozens of such sites and scores 95 million hits a month. The farm's site has generated a cult following for the chicks that Rei Kimura, 29-year-old son of the farm's owner, profiles in a "Chick Diary."

A few months back, for instance, Mr. Kimura introduced Sakura-chan and Momiji-chan, two newly hatched chicks from Gifu prefecture. (Sakura and Momiji are Japanese chicken breeds.) "They are cheeping for their mother," he reported.

The Internet is quietly transforming Japan, making celebrities of small farmers like the Kimuras, empowering women, changing the way people apply for jobs and schools and generally chipping away at traditional patterns of behavior.

Japan is set to become the world's largest user of the Internet next year, according to Infocom, a Japanese research company that specializes in data about the Internet and telecommunications. That is thanks to the country's voracious appetite for cruising cyberspace using mobile terminals, and many say the impact of that love affair will be huge.

"The use of the Internet here has started more as a social thing that in the end is going to have enormous implications," said Jiro Kokuryo, a professor at Keio University's business school, who specializes in e-commerce and information systems. "It is changing people's point of view and empowering them to challenge traditional ways of doing things."

Groups that have traditionally had little influence here are finding their voices and taking action on the Internet. Farmers like the Kimuras escape the huge, bureaucratic distribution system that has been sucking up their profits. Working mothers are banding together to form business ventures. Small companies are using the Internet to expand business and decrease reliance on a primary corporate customer.

These are all revolutionary developments by Japanese standards, and not limited to marginal players. The NEC Corporation, a confirmed member of Japan Inc., is soliciting applications internally for jobs in its expanding Internet-related businesses via e-mail, encouraging employees to seek new opportunities without necessarily asking permission of their bosses.

In the past, that would have been insubordination of the first order and a sure-fire way of wrecking one's career. Although loath to own up to subverting the traditional ways, NEC concedes that requirements that new employees and old managers seeking promotions take a test proving a specified degree of English language skills are largely a result of the Internet. "If this company wants to be in the business of the Internet," said Aston Bridgman, an NEC spokesman, "its employees are going to have to be able to speak English."

The language Mr. Kimura, the egg farmer, has chosen is seduction. Not only does his diary provide updates on the chicks, showing pictures of their first feathers and first eggs, shoppers can also listen to chicks cheeping, watch them hop (albeit rather jerkily) and see how they live.

This month, his mother is featured doing a little dance for joy as part of a Mother's Day sales pitch. Mr. Kimura's father has been more reticent about his son's online sales venture, but he has allowed his picture to be on the Web site.

It is the soft sell at its best, and it is working. Sales were up 20 percent last year, Mr. Kimura said. He is expecting 20 to 30 percent more growth this year -- with all the profit from Internet sales going into the farm's coffers.

The Kimuras' endeavor represents at least a small challenge to one of the world's most cumbersome distribution systems. For decades, the government maintained a tight grip on farmers through production quotas, distribution regulations and stringent standards that rendered a portion of Japan's produce substandard and thus unprofitable.

The government system has been waning for some years. Before they put the farm online, the Kimuras had already begun shipping to the less-restrictive co-op system, which yields better profit margins but still involves middle men.

But the Internet has provided the small farm with direct contact with its customers, and the Kimuras are finding the relationship delightful.

"It's as if we've been doing business from behind a curtain all this time, and suddenly we are face-to-face with our customers," Mr. Kimura said.

Women are also banding together on the Internet. Some 25.6 percent of the 14 million Japanese using the Internet at the end of 1998 were women, according to the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, up from 17.8 percent in the same period a year earlier.

"If we can solve the problems of the time and location of work with the Internet, it will become a means of solving some of the child care problems that women who want to work face in this country and, in the future, the problems relating to care of the elderly," said Naoko Utsonomiya, who has joined an online work place called Y's Staff.

She says the changes brought by the Internet will help crack the bamboo ceiling.

"The business practice of face-to-face negotiation and drinking sake together into the night has made it difficult for women to advance in the business world," she said.

Women like Mrs. Utsonomiya, in particular, are finding new opportunities in cyberspace. Yuri Tazawa is the founder of Y's Staff, a virtual company that attempts to put to use the skills of women who want to work at home. With child care facilities limited and pressure strong on mothers to stay home, most Japanese women leave their jobs after marriage or after having children.

Mrs. Tazawa abandoned a job in computer planning at Sharp Electronics when she married seven years ago. Pregnant, she looked for work and found an editor who gave her a job writing for a magazine aimed at new computer users.

She had two more daughters, and the family moved about Japan, setting up home in four different cities around the country before settling in Hokkaido three years ago.

At that time, articles about "small office, home office," or "soho" workers abounded in the media. Soho workers were typically women with children working from home using the Internet, doing relatively thankless tasks like data entry.

The media hailed the phenomenon as a huge opportunity for former career women, but Mrs. Tazawa was hearing differently. "I heard from women who were doing data entry all day long and earning only 1,000 yen," or about $9 at current exchange rates, Mrs. Tazawa said. "It seemed that in many cases, these women were just cheap labor, and if the Internet was indeed going to overcome all the barriers to women working, that would have to change."

Y's Staff now has about 40 members whose skills range from Web page design and writing to fortune-telling. Mrs. Tazawa drums up projects and posts the parameters and specifications on the Y's Staff Web site, and recruits from among the members to build project teams.

Between 30 and 50 women apply to join Y's Staff each month, and 1 or 2 are accepted. "We have to determine who wants to work for pocket money when the baby is asleep and who really wants to distinguish themselves in society," she said.

Y's Staff are, essentially, an online office. They have done consulting for e-commerce and Internet-related ventures, created contents for home pages, planned and edited online magazines and written books about the Internet and personal computing. Members' earnings range from $280 to $2,800 a month, depending on how active they are.

"If there was no Internet," Mrs. Tazawa said, "after quitting the company and getting married and having kids and moving every one or two years, the only job I would have had would be standing behind a cash register at a local supermarket."

Small-business people, too, are out to use the Internet. Consider Niizuma, a prototype maker in Kamata, a district in Tokyo that is home to hundreds of tiny parts suppliers, machine tool makers and the like. It went online last November, promoting its three-dimensional computer-assisted design abilities and soliciting new customers.

"Small companies usually depend on getting orders from one or two companies," said Kiyokazu Niizuma, the company's founder. "If orders keep coming, you're fine, but if they stop, you have almost no work."
He has long used a sales force to make sure Niizuma did not rely too heavily on any one company. But that is costly and time-consuming, since it takes roughly six months of wining, dining and meetings to secure an order.

In comparison, orders coming in over the Internet take two or three weeks, said Shiro Katagiri, the head of Niizuma's sales department. About 20 companies that Niizuma has never done business with have expressed interest in placing orders, and four have actually done so. "Before we did this, I was thinking at times that I should increase the number of sales people," Mr. Niizuma said. "But now I'm starting to worry about whether we can do all the work coming in over the Internet."

Mr. Niizuma, who is old enough to remember having to flee Tokyo during the American air raids in World War II, thinks the impact of the Internet will reach far beyond his thriving company.

The traditional emphasis on personal relationships, which have been critical to business here, is fast breaking down. New distribution systems are putting businesses and customers into much closer contact, to the benefit of both.

"Even major companies are placing orders in an arm's-length process now to cut costs," he said. "Sony is selling some things online for 1,000 yen less than in stores, which is a big step toward removing intermediaries and connecting to the consumer."

Do these changes alarm him? "I don't have any worries about the future," he said. "To me, the changes the Internet is bringing about represent new chances."


By STEPHANIE STROM
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company

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