Thomas Friedman in the NY Times points to an excellent overview in Foreign Affairs of the state of broadband Internet in Japan and Korea by Thomas Bleha, an 8 year US State Department veteran of Japan. Bleha is writing a book on the race for broadband Internet with an Abe Fellowship.

I’m still in the middle of reading the article as it is long, it’s a great overview of the state of broadband in Japan and Korea. Broadband in Japan is truly incredible- $22/mo. gets you at least 16 Mb/sec. and a little more, about $40/mo., can get you fiber optic broadband at 100 to 1000 Mb/sec.

Related to broadband in Japan is James Seng, who points us to a great presentation by Sadahiro Sato of Softbank (pdf). In it, Sato explains how Softbank has gone to great lengths to build out a VoIP backbone in Japan to support Yahoo!BB Phone services. Lots of great stuff in here.

One challenge is to understand what does 100 or 1000 Mb/sec. mean? Sure it means things like on-demand content, but beyond that, fiber is something of a chicken/egg issue. It’s not clear what that speed of broadband will mean.

I am very much interested in trying to answer that question.

Kishore Mahbubani, the permanent representative of Singapore to the United Nations, has a book out “Can Asians Think? Understanding the Divide Between East and West” and was speaking at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affiars. (This interview is a few years old it seems.)

The most interesting part for me was the Q&A part where Mahbubani talked about Japan within Asia.

QUESTION: One of the question you ask is: Where are the models within Asia for development? I believe you stressed Japan in particular. Could you expand on how Asian societies can draw upon their greatest strengths to fuse them with Western qualities that you have enumerated?

KISHORE MAHBUBANI: If you are in a comfortable, civilized room, like today, you accept the idea that we all have equal potential, and that there are no natural distinctions between the two of us.

But in the 18th century or 19th century, my ancestors happily accepted second-class status in the British colonial empire. And I asked myself: Why? Why did they allow themselves to be colonized? The colonization occurred in societies which were not necessarily backward compared to Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.

One of the great miracles of world history is that a small country like Portugal carved colonies out of huge countries like China. How did a country of 3 million people go to China and say, I’m taking Macao from you? Asians should be forced to think, What did I do wrong? Why did I fall behind?

And what’s even more puzzling is that about 100 or 200 years after the great industrial revolutions, after the great economic advances in the West, still today only one Asian society has caught up with the West, and that is Japan. Maybe Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, et cetera, are getting close. But even a country like China, which was, by far, the most developed society a thousand years ago, has flipped so far back relative to the rest of the world. What has happened?

Asians are doing themselves a huge disfavor if they fail to analyze what has held them back, and, at the same time, they will lose another hundred years if they don’t understand what they must change within their own system to catch up with the West. It is very strange that I am seen sometimes as an advocate of superior Asian values, because when I look at Asian societies, I just see their weaknesses. It amazes me that they are still repeating the mistakes that they made in the past.

For example, in an essay I wrote on the turn of the millennium, I argued that the West succeeds on one very simple principle: meritocracy. You always ensure that you pick the best people to run your societies, your universe. A lesson I learned at Harvard after one year was how ruthlessly meritocractic Harvard was. They didn’t care if you were from Harvard or you had a Ph.D. from Harvard. If they appointed any professor, they made sure that professor was the best in his field anywhere in the world.

That’s the way you run a society and progress. And the trouble is that, unfortunately, most Asian societies haven’t learned such basic lessons.

If more Asian societies are going to achieve what Japan has done, there will have to be far more fundamental questioning than there exists today in the Asian world.

This is a fascinating, fascinating speech and interview. Highly recommended.

The interesting thing is that Japan is far from a meritocracy. For the past 60 years, since the end of WW2, Japan has never been a meritocracy. It is not one today. The prime example of the past few years is Shuji Nakamura, the scientist who developed the blue light-emitting diode which was necessary for the DVD and white LEDs for lighting. He was not compensated appropriately for his innovations and subsequently filed suit against his company. The Japanese courts ruled against him and today he is a professor at UC Santa Barbara.

Can Asians Think? Understanding the Divide Between East and West [carnegiecouncil.org]

via bubblegeneration.com

Look at the store that the Chinese are rioting in front of…

Chinese demonstrators clashed with the police Sunday in Guangzhou in front of a Japanese-owned store. [nytimes.com]