[ad_1]
While the West romanticizes Japan as an arcane futurescape, a neon-swathed land of bullet trains and buzzing toilets, in truth the world’s No. 3 economy struggles with a deep resistance to change and a fetishism of archaic bureaucracy. But Taro Kono, the country’s 60-year-old Digital Minister, is on a mission to bring Japan’s reality bit by bit closer to its oft-perceived modernistic image.
Kono may have his own lifesize mechanical avatar designed by a professor at Osaka University—”I’m hoping to use it to let people know about the new national ID card we’re issuing,” he says—though today his homeland lags badly when it comes to digitalization. Hence, he is only too happy to strike a small blow against staid etiquette by jumping on a Zoom interview.
“Japan was quite good with analogue technology,” says Kono, who has previously served as Foreign Minister and Defense Minister. “But when things moved to digital, we were too content with analogue things, so we didn’t invest enough.”
Taro Kono, Japan’s then regulatory reform and vaccine minister, in Tokyo, on March 29, 2021.
Akio Kon—Bloomberg/Getty Images
According to Kono, Japan’s huge government deficit—public debt to GDP stands at 256%, the…
[ad_2]
