By Nir Platek '81
(The Internationalist Spring/Summer 2006 Vol. 37)

Joichi (Joi) Ito, class of 1981, currently chairman of Six Apart Japan and general manager of International Operations for Technorati, is a pioneer in IT and a "serial entrepreneur." As founder of PSINet Japan, Eccosys, Digital Garage, and Infoseek Japan, he was one of the first to introduce the internet in Japan. In 1997, Time magazine ranked him in the CyberElite. In 2000 he was listed as one of the "50 Stars of Asia" by Business Week, and in 2001 the World Economic Forum in Davos chose him as one of the hundred "Global Leaders of Tomorrow" for 2002. He is the only Japanese board member for various international organizations, including Creative Commons, ICANN, and The Open Source Initiative (OSI), and has served, and continues to serve, on numerous Japanese government committees and boards. He advises the government on IT, privacy, and computer security-related issues. Joi recently joined the Board of Directors of Nishimachi International School. In an exclusive interview with fellow Nishimachi classmate Nir Platek for The Internationalist, Joi talks about the school and its mission, multiculturalism, the information society, IT and education, and Nishimachi alumni and their affinity for entrepreneurship.

Nir Platek: I understand that although you are Japanese, and born in Kyoto, you grew up in Canada and the US. You spent one year only at Nishimachi, ninth grade, when you came back to Japan in 1981. What do you remember from your days at Nishimachi?

Joi Ito: It was an important time for me. Before I came to Japan, I lived in Michigan, in the suburbs of Detroit. This was back in the early eighties when the whole automobile-industry-related "Japan bashing" was at its height. Most of the kids in the public school I attended had connections to the automobile industry. I was the only Japanese student in our school and got picked on a lot. During the summer breaks, I would visit my grandmother in Iwate-ken and attend a local Japanese summer school. That was also tough, because the Japanese students treated me like an American. It was difficult on my self-esteem. Moving to Nishimachi helped change my view of being Japanese and bicultural

When I got to Nishimachi, I realized that being bicultural wasn't weird but was actually an asset. There was a whole community of people similar to me. My sister [Mimi Ito, class of `83] and I had never experienced this before, and it made me change the way I looked at myself. Although I spent only one year of my life at the school, I keep in touch, to this day, with my Nishimachi friends more than with any other group from the other schools I attended. I wish I had been lucky enough to have gone to Nishimachi since kindergarten.

One strong memory I have of my days at Nishimachi is our trips to Sano and Tateshina and other places, which really helped me understand Japanese culture.

But there is more to my Nishimachi memories. I am on the board of the Foundation for Global Education and Communication, which operates schools in Iwate-ken. This is a family business. My mother used to run it, and Haru Matsukata Reischauer was on the board until she got ill. We spent a lot of time with the Reischauers and the Matsukatas, and that made me appreciate the importance of the Nishimachi philosophy and its mission. That is why I decided to accept a position on the Nishimachi Board. Even though I don't have children, I think that it's very important to further the Nishimachi mission.

Nir Platek: Obviously, the Matsukata philosophy, with its focus on the value of multicultural communication and tolerance, is probably one thing that all Nishimachi alumni have in common. During the period my sister and I attended Nishimachi in the 1970s, we remember Matsukata-sensei being on campus every day and knowing us all by our first names. She was sensitive to our various international backgrounds and made sure we represented our various identities. For example, at one point, in my sister's class, there were seventeen students from nine different nations: Children from such far-flung places as Nauru, Liberia, Ethiopia, Israel, Denmark, and so on, were mixed in with Japanese and Americans. This illustrates the multinational affinity in the classroom, even back then.

I understand that both you and your sister, Mimi, are very active in promoting multicultural exchange through the Momoko Ito Foundation and a weblog site called Chanpon. What do you hope to achieve through these activities?

Joi Ito: My mother was very focused on multicultural exchange. She worked closely with the Reischauers, but unfortunately they all passed away before they realized all of their dreams. Both my sister and I are busy, so we're not as intensely involved as they were, but, in the long term, certainly, we want to share their legacy with as many people as possible. I believe that being bicultural is different from being chanpon, or 'mixed'. Bicultural means you have two cultures and switch from one to the other. The Nishimachi way is different in that it is not just "bilingual" but chanpon, and that makes it unique. Rather than switching between two very different cultures and languages, we mix the two cultures and the two languages, thus creating a real bridge between them. I know many people who actually raise their kids separately in terms of language, where the mother speaks Japanese to the children, say, and the father English. I am not against that. But that's different from mixing the languages. That's the interesting part, we think—the mixing. I think that many international negotiations these days are somewhat superficial. A lot of posturing in the UN and in other organizations in the public eye. Unless each party has a clear understanding of the other in real time—which is what chanpon-style blending lets the parties do — I think it's going to be very difficult to find solutions for many of the problems that plague our societies.

The Momoko Ito Foundation was set up in the United States with the goal of promoting true, chanpon-style, multicultural exchange between the United States and Japan. The problem is that you can't create this "mixing" thing without the support of a community and an environment where both languages and cultures are equally at home, like Nishimachi. My sister is raising her kids now in a multicultural environment. We've been talking to a lot of Nishimachi alumni who are doing the same thing, and they are encountering many of the same issues.

You find chanpon types all over the world. We talk to one another on the internet, recommend books, and chat. We created the Chanpon weblog site for that purpose. It's been slow in developing, but I think now more and more people are using the net, and more people understand what blogs are.

Nishimachi is a great place to start, because many of us here are already chanpon. We would like to work with the alumni community to get other people on board. I think there are others who didn't attend Nishimachi who might be similar, so we're trying to target those people as well.

Nir Platek: The chanpon idea is something that is easy for Nishimachi alumni to relate to. I'm not American. I'm Israeli (born in Japan) and am definitely a chanpon and so are my kids (both born in Japan as well). Right now, our alumni board has five members. When we communicate with each other, our e-mails end up being half in Japanese, half in English. I have a sister, who spent nine years at Nishimachi. When we communicate, it's Hebrew, Japanese, and English, all mixed together. I think it's not so much a question of bilingual or trilingual, but rather a mixed thing, as you say. I also relate to what you say about how a chanpon-style multicultural exchange might have an impact on global politics, in places such as the Middle East, which is where I come from. I think that as alumni we all share the hope that the school will maintain—and strengthen—its chanpon culture.

Let's turn to your achievements to date. You are definitely a pioneer in the field of IT in Japan, and not only in Japan. I think you were the first person to introduce the internet here. Is that true?

Joi Ito: Yes, we had the first personal home page in Japan as far as I know. I also helped set up the first commercial internet service provider in Japan. Later on, we were one of the first talking about weblogs in Japan as well.

Nir Platek: I heard it all started in your bathroom. Is that a true story?

Joi Ito: A company called IIKK received a license to provide internet connection services in Japan, but they were a small foreign company and had a hard time getting an office here. Initially, they were in the back of a karaoke outlet, but I later offered to let them move into my bathroom and put the main router in there.

Nir Platek: That's amazing. It's clear you're a person who uses IT to the maximum, both in your professional life and in your private life. You use it to communicate not only interpersonally, but with the public at large. Anyone in the world can gain access to your thoughts and activities, and even your schedule, simply by accessing your blogs. Obviously, you're a strong advocate of the free exchange of information and ideas, anytime, anywhere. What is the role of IT in our lives, in your opinion, and how will the development of IT influence society and civilization, and particularly with respect to the education of children?

Joi Ito: I think any technology is neutral in terms of whether it's good or bad. And I think that the advancement of IT, just like the advancement of nuclear power or mass travel, is just something that progresses and that no one can stop. IT is making our economies larger, more complex, and faster. One of the byproducts of faster, more complex, larger, and directly interconnected markets, is the risk of what some people would call fluctuation amplification, or the risk of things blowing up or crashing. A lot of the terrorism that we have today and a lot of the wars we have today have a larger impact on the world because of the media; the way the media works, and lot of the way that media has amplified this is through IT, including satellites. For that reason I think that there are new risks associated with IT.

In the old days when things moved rather slowly, were generally smaller, and information wasn't that widespread, you could actually control people, armies, cities, markets with central bankers and stuff. Now you can't. Everything is out of control. For instance, it's impossible now to protect your child completely from information which you don't want them accessing. They're going to use the internet, and you can put all the filters on you want, but they will find information you don't want them to find. You can no longer control your children because they know technology better than you do. Not too long ago we were able to monitor what they watched on television, put our children on school buses, and isolate kids for a long time.

One of the results of the IT explosion is that it's very difficult to maintain authority that is based on lack of information of the people around you. Today, you have to assume that they have access to all the information you have and more. So what can society do? I think that at Nishimachi, and even at home, parents can coach kids, but they can't teach them as much as they used to. So I think we have to switch modes. Teachers have to behave more like coaches. Certainly, it's frustrating for them to have their authority challenged, but I don't see any other way. This may not be an altogether positive development since it means overturning the teacher/student hierarchy, which has been the basis of education for millennia. But I think, for Nishimachi as a school and for us as a society, we need to look carefully at the role of the educator because I think they should be focusing on coaching children ethics, understanding context, tolerance toward others, and responsibility. I believe children have the potential to mature very quickly. There are cases in history where we had thirteen-year-old kings who were able to run nations.

Nir Platek: You have recently joined the Nishimachi Board of Directors, which means you're going to be involved in making strategic decisions for the school that are going to impact what the school's going to look like in five or ten years. What would you like to achieve in your role as a director of Nishimachi?

Joi Ito: I think Board members have the core responsibility of ensuring the stability of the school while supporting, assessing, and overseeing the headmaster. I think that first and foremost is really the primary functions, such as the budget. A lot of my time is spent in just reading through all the documents I'm sent and then providing my opinions on them

In terms of the strategic plan and mid- to long-term planning, I am especially interested in the new library/media center project. I would like to support it in some way—in whatever way I can—because I think libraries are moving very quickly with the internet I can talk to teachers or bring in speakers or give advice. I think it's an extra burden for many teachers to keep up with the rapid changes in IT. I would be happy to try to bridge the gap.

I am also interested in discussing the possibility of introducing financial literacy to the curriculum. I think that children should have financial literacy by the time they are in junior high school and perhaps even earlier. I have a friend working with a school in Chicago which has such a program for middle school children. Students learn about stocks and are actually given real money to buy shares. So far they have made money. This is a fairly low-income area of Chicago, where the parents may not be stock-market savvy, so the kids explain to them how it works. They donate their profits to a charity. They have to make an assessment of the charity, visit it, ask questions, and then decide who is going to receive their donations. I think it's important for kids to be exposed to both ideas: one, financial literacy, and, two, giving.

Nishimachi has always had a special focus on giving that I believe is embodied in the Matsukata vision. The school should not only be a place for the privileged. Although there are already some scholarship programs in place for less wealthy families, I think the school could do more. Perhaps there are ways to use the internet for this purpose.

In conclusion, those are some of the areas where I think I'd like to contribute. Again, you know, I don't think it's the role of Board members to be involved operationally, but rather to provide support. If there's a teacher who wants to take an idea and run with it, I think I would be supportive.

Nir Platek: You're what they call a "serial entrepreneur" and a supporter of new businesses. Like you, I'm an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist. I was involved in starting up companies both in Israel and Japan. And I know that we are not the only ones. Look at the Nishimachi alumni community, which, for some reason, has produced more than a few entrepreneurs in a country where there are very few entrepreneurs in general.

Joi Ito: When you look at global entrepreneurship monitor figures one of the questions pollsters ask is, "Do people around you respect entrepreneurs?" I think in the US and Canada around 80% of those asked say yes, they respect entrepreneurs. In Japan the figure is only around 10%. If you look at the traditional career path of someone on an elite track in Japan, someone who goes to the "right" schools and then gets a job in the "right" company, you realize he is exposing himself to almost no risk. If he continues to play his cards right and doesn't make any big mistakes, he will receive a nice big lump sum when he retires. That's what we call a low-risk high-return path. Entrepreneurship is about high-risk high-return, low-risk low-return. Once you have a low-risk high-return path, there is much less incentive to take on the high-risk low-return challenge. Think about the average kid who comes out of some Japanese village in the inaka (countryside). Say he or she has the choice of going to a big, prestigious corporation, like IBM or Mitsubishi, or setting up some little business on his or her own, and the parents are involved in the decision. Clearly, they are going to want their son or daughter to opt for an IBM or a Mitsubishi. Some people I headhunted for new high-risk projects in which I invested used to work in big companies like IBM. It turns out they still haven't told their parents that they've left IBM, or wherever, because the parents would never be able to admit "failure" in their little village. After bragging so much about the son or daughter who got the job with IBM, it would be a real comedown to say he or she was now working in some kind of an internet company.

I think the only ones who end up as entrepreneurs are those who misunderstand the risks involved or those who calculate the risks but have self-confidence. I think Nishimachi alumni fall into the second category. If you look at the Japanese parents who send their children to Nishimachi, they are not your typical Japanese parents. They have the courage to send their kids to a school that isn't accredited by the Ministry of Education, because they want their children to get a better education. And education is more important than accreditation. I think your typical student who attends Nishimachi probably has more open-minded and less conventional parents because they chose a school for their child that fosters individual and independent thinking. These circumstances are conducive, I think, to producing entrepreneurs.