Aadhaar put Japan behind tech curve: Prof. Jun Murai, ‘father of Internet’ in Japan

India’s deployment of Aadhaar and India Stack some years ago has placed Japan far behind the technology curve, said Jun Murai, a Japanese technocrat who is considered to be the father of the Internet in Japan.

“We were far behind after the Indian deployment of Aadhaar and India stack, especially because we didn’t have the numbers,” he said while delivering a video address at India Japan Science Technology Innovation Forum at Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru.

Professor Murai, who is also known as Internet Samurai, said Japan was keenly looking at the India Stack and technological advancements made by other countries and decided to rejig its IT strategy. “It is called the Japan digital Garden City initiative and it covers the entire nation of Japan and not only centralised big cities like Tokyo and Osaka,” Mr. Jun said. “We are doing what India has done much ahead of time in terms of facilitating small towns and villages with internet net access,” he added.

However, he said the internet and broadband adoption that was accelerated during the three COVID-19 years, has led to lighting growth in tech adoption across the globe, and especially in Japan. Commenting on the speed at which internet adoption grew earlier, he said, in the year 2000, only 6% of the world population had access to the Internet and today more than 70% of the world’s population has internet access.

“In the last two decades, internet availability and adoption have rapidly grown, as internet and connectivity have become the core energy and core environment for all activities. However, the acceleration brought by the pandemic changed the pace all together,” he observed.

‘Internet is essential’

If energy was the only critical infrastructure earlier, today internet and digital technologies are on par with power and other elements like water, transportation and supply chain, he observed. “In Ukraine we found that electricity is key for digital infrastructure. Energy and communication must exist together to realise what we might today consider as “core infrastructure”, which according to Mr. Jun are computers, networks, and digital data.

Going forward, human ingenuity and creativity, would require various devices and tools that are supported by digital infrastructure, Mr. Jun stressed. “Today, almost everybody is equipped with a supercomputer called a smartphone and everyone is connected and they have a lot of computing power attached to their body,” he said.

Mr. Jun was hopeful about innovations in health, education and sustainability.

Recalling his long connection with India in the formative years of information technology age, he said, “it was in the 80s that I first visited Bombay (now Mumbai). I learnt a lot from India about information and digital technology even then. Since then I have been working together with a many professors and researchers from India mainly to establish the infrastructure of the Internet and the computer network in Japan,” said Professor Jun, who teaches at Keio University and specialises in computer science, distributed computing and the Internet.