Boris links to a fascinating interview with Cyrus & Joi from 1995, over 10 years ago. In 1995, I was still in university!
The 1995 Joi was talking about everything from cryptography in Japan, trends in online advertising, ecommerce, telecommunications, Japanese banking reform, women as leading consumers, the future breakup of NTT, and more.
Joi's themes these days (ICANN, Creative Commons, Mozilla, BitTorrent, weblogs, etc. etc.) are pretty different but at the same time they are all tied in some way to these themes he was talking about back in 1995.
The quote that resonated the most with me was this one:
Ito: A lot of Japanese say, "We need to protect our culture." But I say, "No, you want to distribute your culture." You want everybody to be able to learn Japanese. If you can spread it out, and find people who are really interested in keeping up with kanji, you don't have to force people to do it to protect it anymore. I know it's a difficult "sell," but if you look at virtual Japan rather than physical Japan, you don't see it diminishing because of the Internet.
That "virtual Japan" is larger than physical Japan is the reality today, especially for children the world around who enjoy Japanese manga and anime, as well as Japanese video games.
memory lane! I remember reading this and IIRC that was around the time I first met Joi, Cyrus & Sen.