My first job out of college was for Mitsubishi Electric in Japan. I was recruited to help internationalize the workforce and encourage them to do simple things like take holidays and finish work around 5pm. I was an electronic engineer and I'd just come from the UK with a degree specializing in micro-electronics, VSLI design, and other specialities. I was excited to go to the home of consumer electronics having grown up with brands like Sony, Sanyo, Hitachi, Panasonic, Toshiba, Casio and Mitsubishi. I thought it'd be like a ballet dancer going to Paris, the chance to work with the best of the best. Holy crap. It was like going back in time. Everything was paper-based. Circuit design was done on paper. PCBs were laid out on tracing paper, one for each layer. Reports were hand written and submitted each week. You bought your own notebooks and 0.5mm pencils. The idea of using CAD, or simulators, was unheard of. Thankfully, I had worked at GEC-Marconi Research in the 80s and learned how to make technical drawings and my written Japanese was not too bad, so I survived. However, it was all grind. The highest technology they had was an ISDN fax machine that could send pages through extremely fast. It was a sight to behold.
At first, none of us had computers. The programmers had them, but electronic engineers had nothing. There were old HP Apollo workstations in a computer lab that could be used. They were also connected to the internal IP network. There was no external network access, but weirdly, you could receive emails from outside the company. One day, I found out that my American friend who worked at a Mitsubishi site in Kobe could send email outside the company. After some research (no WWW back then, so I just read books), I found out that I could send email outside the company if I added the domain name of the Kobe facility to the end of the outbound email address, for example anon@foo.com@kobe-mitsu.co.jp. This was in the days before spam and when smtp servers would forward anything. As I could receive email directly, this enabled me to have an active working email! The next step was to get a tool chain for the workstations. To do that DEC had an FTP by email service. You'd send a bot a request to FTP something for you and then it'd email it to you in unencoded chunks of emails. I downloaded gcc and other tools and managed to build a number of binaries to run on the work station. However, what I wanted to do was have a way to get email on my newly acquired Compaq black and white passive matrix LCD laptop that was at my desk back in the main work hall (a place of about 500 desks full of people where I worked every day). My laptop was on the same LAN as the Apollo workstations, but it was running Windows 3.1 and DOS. I had an email client called Eudora (or something similar) that I wanted to use. The issue was that I needed something to run on the workstation that I could talk to. I found what I needed - Popper, a POP3 compliant postmaster app that would enable me to access the email on the workstations. However, it needed to run as root.
After hacking around on the system for a week or so, I managed to find out that the /etc/rc directories were actually world writable! This was incredible, because anything placed in them would be executed as root on boot up. I didn't have the ability to reboot the workstations, but I had access to the power cable. So, I stuck scripts in there, yanked the power cord (sorry hard disk) and power cycled. Popper was installed and suddenly, the whole section had email at their desks. No one asked me how I did it, but they were all using it.
After about a year, the local IT folks suddenly got the message that sending email externally was something that would actually be useful for work and so we were told they would enable it. However, they would only allow it on a white list basis. You had to provide a list of email addresses that you wanted to send email to and have it approved by your boss. It all had to be printed out, prefaced with the appropriate request cover sheet, stamped and then sent via internal mail to the IT people. By then I was on a number of mailing lists and had healthy conversations going with a number of folks external to the company so I'd say I had about 50 to 100 email addresses on my list. I dutifully printed them all out and submitted them. After about a week the rejection came through - too many. I didn't care much because I was already bypassing their firewall.
During this time, consumer internet and the WWW arrived. I had signed up at home and my top of the line imported Pentium 120MHz Gateway 2000 was regularly dialing up gol.com (Global Online) Osaka's finest ISP pretty much every night. I found myself dying to use tools like AltaVista (at the time, the fastest search engine out there) at work to find out answers to technical problems. I purchased a 3COM PCMCIA modem for my craptop and surreptitiously would remove the RJ45 cable from the shared office phone to dial up my own ISP from work. One day I was doing a search when I felt the presence of someone looking over my shoulder. As we had no cubes, everyone could see everything you did, but as most of my work was in English, they never bothered much, but Mr. Tanaka was a smart, but elderly chap who was pretty good at English and my web browsing had caught his eye. Mr Takana was technically a section chief (Kacho), but he did not have any section to manage. Some of the older managers ended up in a special area in the great hall where they would have the nice desk, the chair with arms, and even a secretary, but no actual section. I was told they were parked there and they did their own thing, not really reporting to anyone or responsible for anything, but still part of the overall department. Anyway, he really was a nice guy and just at that moment I had done a search for something and ended up on a German web site where I was sifting though some academic paper on the topic I was searching for. He asked me what I'd done:
"cliff jumper-chan, what did you just do?"
"Oh, I wanted to find out about this topic, so I did a search for it, then I clicked on the link and got to this document"
"But it looks like it is in Germany. Is it really in Germany?"
"Yes, but I'm not actually dialing Germany, it's using a network that passes on packets of data so, it's um, kind of free"
At this point, I thought I was for the chopper and there was going to be a huge explosion of misunderstanding. Back then, the whole concept of the Internet was not widely understood but people did understand international telephone calls and that they cost a LOT of money. Instead, he said with huge eyes "but it is sooo quick! How does it work? Can you search for something for me?"
After that, I showed him how quickly it all worked. Altavista would show you how quickly a search took under the results and how quickly, even at 14.4K documents from anywhere in the world could be viewed. He was stunned. But then he leaned in close and said "You better not show this to anyone else. I don't think it is allowed!" And so I nodded, disconnected and counted myself lucky. That gaijin (foreigner) get out of jail free card had paid off again.
After I left I went to work in the US and there too there were fits and starts with Internet freedom at work. We had Slotus Notes for a while which would cache everything anyone asked for (yes, I would look through the cache and peruse the pron others thought no one knew they were viewing). We also veering into too much access where you could put machines outside the corporate firewall if you knew how. But in the end, we ended up in a reasonable situation where most US companies will have a guest WiFi network for visitors and employees have WiFi and VPNs from home, etc. But not. in Japan.
I still go to Japan regularly and held ANA top status (not any more, thanks Covid) and the IT policies that Japanese employees have to put up with fall strongly in line with Dilbert's Mordac, preventer of information services philosophy. For a long time, WiFi was forbidden. You could only connect over Ethernet and then only with an approved MAC address. Once you connected, there was a captured portal for any web address that would require you to login with your employee id number and password. After that, all web traffic would be proxied, but with a really ancient, horribly incompatible proxy, so only web browsing would work and not much else. Any website that had any possible entertainment aspect would be blocked. When I started trying to share YouTube videos with staff in Japan to share unboxing videos of our competitor's products, I'd receive polite requests to send the URL to their personal email addresses because YouTube is blocked in most Japanese companies.
Visit a Japanese company today and you'll be lucky to get guest WiFi. It's best to take your own hotspot with you instead. This is just par for the course. Japanese companies cannot handle the idea of anyone using their Internet. Even "free WiFi" in Japan is mainly just for foreigners who suitably register to get it.
I have seen some Japanese workers manage to bypass corporate IT in clever ways. One group I worked with had a meeting room that had a DSL modem in it to a local ISP. It enabled them to use Skype so they could do cheap video conferences with the US. Skype was banned for employees, but this secret internet connection enabled them to get around that and do the calls with their US partner. In another instance, the Japanese team was so unable to spend any money that the US partner bought them a speaker phone so they could do teleconferences.
I should stop rambling, but here's my take away:
1. They are incredibly risk averse and the Internet is full of risk
2. They have very little budget for anything, even basic items like notebooks, pens or office furniture is rarely bought.
3. They are really bad at adopting new thing or changing processes. The rule is that the 2nd time though, it's easy, but the 1st time is impossible.
4. They are not as high-tech as you'd expect. A lot of the innovation came in the 80s and since then, it's been all about perfecting what already exists, to the nth degree.
I'd love for Japan to get back to being super high-tech. I wonder if they'll ever get back to that.