Blurred and fuzzy future for tele-connections
by Paul Kallender

Did last year's spate of stabbings by out-of-control school students change our basic perception of Japanese classrooms as fundamentally peaceful, if uninspired, places? Imagine, instead of orderly lines of desks and quiet (or otherwise) students, young Taro or Keiko sitting in a virtual reality box. There's no kanji-littered blackboard describing the dates of deceased Emperors in there; in fact Young Taro is peering through 3-D specs, his left glove hand manipulating a VR avatar, his right a mouse, with which he busily selects scenarios for a geography game adventure menu. Or, maybe, a maze ... or a space battle. Soon he is frenetically obliterating GUNDAM-style robots, enemy space cruisers, or even his math teacher.

Next year, the usually stuffy Ministry of Education (MOE) plans to add an educational twist to "game over" by starting experiments with its new T-REX, a cube-shaped, 3-D megamedia Virtual Environment System. Part of a JPY100 million R&D project by the National Institute of Multimedia (NIME), T-REX is one of two 3-D learning "cubes" (the other, known as the "cabin," resides at the University of Tokyo,) aiming to push Japan's envelop in virtual learning and tele-education technologies. "We haven't worked out the applications yet, and the real target is higher education," emphasizes NIME research associate Kikuo Asai, who then quickly roams through T-REX's potential use scenarios.

Initial experiments, Asai says, will focus on developing a virtual library room for testing the system's GUI interface. If that goes successfully, MOE will crank up the current Silicon Graphics workstation-based system so that in about five years, NIME hopes T-REX will be able to produce interactive 3D images of such things as molecules, DNA strands, or even hydrodynamics modeling. "The first step is to create a realistic, virtual reality ... but we imagine a famous doctor demonstrating difficult surgery -- the student can remotely make the correct incision. Or we record the procedure, and the student can operate on a VR simulation," he says.

But even as Asai sees T-REX's VR environment as helping "creative chaos" research, he admits his beast is already heading for extinction. It's going to be too big and expensive to use as an effective tool, he says, so as soon as PC hard drives catch up, MOE wants to develop a desktop-driven version which also shrinks the room into a pair of goggles.

MOE gets wired

As Asai wrestles with his technological dinosaur, MOE is pressing ahead in beefing up its already considerable satellite resources devoted to networking Japan's schools, according to NIME's director general, Takashi Sakamoto. In 1996, NIME pioneered Japanese satellite tele-education by building its Space Collaboration System (SCS) network. Beginning with Tokyo and Kyoto Universities, the network has matured into a huge infrastructure based around 139 campus-installed Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) groundstations, linking some 116 institutes of higher education.

Unlike the UK's Open University, which relies on boring old BBC-2 reruns -- or Japan's equivalent, the SKY PerfecTV-borne University of the Air -- SCS works by dedicated 1.5Mbps satellite links which can beam data or lectures from campus A to B through Japan Satellite System's JCSat-3 satellite. "SCS is the biggest network in the world ... there is not such a sophisticated system in any other country," Sakamoto says proudly. NIME has also developed its Medical Information Network by Communications Satellite (MINC-UH), which Sakamoto trumpets as the world's first state-of-the art-digital high-definition, medical-use television broadcasting system. This now has some 30 university hospitals linked in a network through Space Communications Corp.'s Superbird B satellite to provide bi-directional HDTV images.

Such moves are just the beginning of networking for the next decade. As you read this, the Makuhari-based maestros have just launched their Educational and Learning, or "el-Net" system. The first thousand of an eventual 5,000 VSATs installed in Prefectural adult education centers, libraries, and community centers are already being plugged into the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications' new Gigabit Network. Then, this September, MOE will cross-wire 1,076 high schools into its Advanced Educational Network Model Project (AENMP). This time, the formula will integrate NTT Satellite Communication's Megawave satellite-Internet system (see CJ, June 1999 -- Ed.) into a terrestrial mix of wireless local loops, digital subscriber and fiber optic lines and even cable TV networks, pushing high bandwidth PC-to-PC multimedia tele-educational and data services into classrooms.

All this is commendable, according to tele-education expert Prof. Toshio Kosuge of Chofu's University of Electro-Communications. It's desperately needed to make the underutilized SCS' minimum estimated JPY140 billion price tag worthwhile. "We already only use SCS maybe once a month for a few hours, or once every three months. So far it's a waste of our taxes in a sense," Kosuge says. One reason why the system is not so popular is that it needs technicians to handle it, which educational institutions are unwilling to pay for. So good old fashioned ISDN Internet will have to do.

Another reason, implicitly recognized by NIMES' development of el-Net and AENMP, is that SCS provides favored universities a fleet of Rolls Royce's, but not enough car keys. Transmissions beamed into fixed locations without internal networking make the system a superb teleconferencing system, but a limited interactive multimedia tool. Evidence of this is provided by the network's usage profile; last year Japan's pampered profs, when they did use the system, spent around 60 percent of airtime in meetings and office work -- there wasn't that much teaching done.

Then there are the issues of content, curriculum, and competition. If everyone under 18 in Japan is rote-learning the same facts from the same textbooks from Chitose to Naha, what's the point of providing cutting edge, dynamic educational tools? At the university level, there is occasional evidence of need, says SCS' godfather and former NIME director general, Hidetoshi Kato. "Mining is dead in Japan and there is only one respected professor left. One day when a group of graduate students wanted to learn something about mining, they were able to have a lecture through SCS," he says.

Another very interesting episode, Kato explains, involved a horse ulcer X-ray which he remembers being transmitted by a consortia of vets. Japan only has four major veterinarian teaching hospitals; Iwate and Hokkaido specialize in cows, Tokyo on cats and dogs, and Gifu only understands horses. So when the folks out in Hokkaido don't know what's wrong with Champion, they can ask the good old boys down south. "NIME is trying to make tele-education more useful," says Kosuge. "[But] at the moment, we don't have the incentives. We will need a revolution in the Japanese national universities, including competition. We need to focus on real information sharing between specialized universities," for the system to work.

Ironically, NIME's day of triumph also proved a bit of an anticlimax, admits Sakamoto; when the prime minister recently addressed a national grouping of 1000 professors in real time over an impressive 80-VSAT network, and asked for comments and questions, "we didn't have any," he says.

A poor diagnosis

Given the MOE's scale of investment, Kato believes tele-education has a future in Japan, however blurred the picture. But if telemedicine were a patient, he or she would be on life support, says Shigekoto Kaihara, director of the National Okura Hospital in Tokyo. Kaihara, who authored a 1997 report on the application of remote medicine for the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MHW), believes the ministry -- together with doctors and the medical industry -- have already more-or-less abandoned what had initially looked like a promising technology.

Japanese telemedicine started back in 1971 in Wakayama, when the local authority plugged a CCTV into a telephone line and transmitted AVs of sick and spluttering locals to a rural clinic (notes went by fax). Later that year, NTT transmitted the first X-ray. The year 1974 saw the first primitive medical teleconferencing, and by the late 1970s, Okinawa and a handful of hospitals were tinkering with conferencing and remote diagnosis. But there telemedicine has languished -- in pilot-project limbo; lots of MHW-funded experiments with better and better technology, but no national implementation.

"Telemedicine is very successful and potentially useful, but its not yet sustainable," says Kaihara. Here's why.

Sensibly, doctors have to be able to be in the physical presence of patients to make a legal diagnosis. In December 1998, after considerable pressure by Kaihara, MHW allowed remote consultations to become legal, provided there was physical contact for first diagnosis. But still, quite rightly, many doctors including Kaihara are unwilling to treat patients without being able to touch them.

Secondly, money's an issue. Most medical equipment, surgeries, and operating theaters aren't built with multimedia in mind. Buying, installing, and converting equipment costs cash, which isn't covered by MHW subsidies. Applications like remote surgery -- where advisory doctors can monitor fellow surgeons in particularly difficult operations -- is always going to be useful, but few outside of MINC-UH participants are going to cough up the yen. And without demand, Sony and the other big players are not going to lower costs for tailor-made hardware.

Enter the communications kings

So, to pessimists, telemedicine looks consigned to small-scale, subsidized projects in favored hospitals, and MOE's mammoth infrastructure remains an eight-lane interstate linking a few busloads of vacationing academics. But the technologies paid for by Japanese taxpayers could spurn, in a classic act of Japanese benevolence, tremendous profits to Japan and some public benefits to Asia. How? Almost unnoticed, Japan's elite Communications Research Laboratory (CRL) in Kogane has been quietly snowballing a tiny but dramatically successful satellite program with which Japan could take the lead in building the region's next-generation satellite communications network, the Asian-Pacific Information Infrastructure, or APII.

Begun in 1991, the PARTNERS project, using spare capacity on the CRL's old ETS-5 experimental satellite, began testing telemedicine and educational services to research institutes around the region. Originally financed on a shoestring through a low-priority Ministry of Foreign Affair-licensed ODA program, PARTNERS and its 1995 successor, the POST-PARTNERS project (PPP) have proved dramatically successful, gradually linking up 73 of NIME's members, plus hospitals like Kaihara's Okura -- and even elementary schools -- to counterparts through hubs in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and as far as Fiji.

The 90s haven't been kind to CRL. In 1991, things looked great. Designing increasingly successful communications systems to match Japan' s growing prowess in satellite technology, CRL, Mitsubishi Electric, NEC, and Toshiba could look to a lucrative future building Japan's growing fleet of communications and broadcasting satellites. The world market beckoned. Spotting the threat, the following year the US weighed in with Super 301, maneuvering Japan to the notorious "Satellite Agreement," through which Japan must allow commercial satellite contracts to go to open bidding.

The concession didn't look so bad to a spineless government always ready to purchase token big ticket items to massage the trade imbalance. Also, the agreement had the practical effect of forcing Japan to buy (always cheaper and usually better) US hardware instead of domestically procured satellites. But it did also achieve its real dirty work in nipping Japan's nascent satellite industry in the bud, knocking out competition as US and Europe compete to launch a dozen-odd constellations ranging from a few to a couple of hundred birds each.

Meanwhile, the bubble burst, starving CRL of funds even for its reduced role researching next-generation technologies. But CRL is bouncing back, despite the failure of two of its last satellites to reach orbit (a thruster snag on one, a rocket shortfall for the other -- neither CRL's fault). Last year was a big year for PPP, as CRL squeezed a three-year funding extension. Much more importantly, the regional goodwill created (and no doubt, the free technical exchange exported) by PPP enabled the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications to get APEC to accept the CRL's next POST-PARTNERS bird to become the Pan-Asian test bed for APII. The weapon? The highly-advanced Gigabit Satellite, the potential of which has led CRL's communications kings to become both modest and disingenuous about what the future holds.

"Our task is to develop new communications technologies and I think we should promote and advance them to the next generation to promote the future of broadband communications," says CRL deputy Director Takashi Iida, who does much of PPP's old-fashioned human networking. In what could be Japan's leap into big-league, next-generation global communications provision, the Gigabit Satellite looks devastatingly efficient. Firstly, if successfully launched, it will do just what is claims it will -- demonstrate a proposed 1.2Gbps broadband link with scanning spot beams to give wide area capacity for trunking, supercomputer, and multimedia Internet networking, to let Asia's scattered and earthquake-prone archipelagos gain access to next century's global information infrastructure. But the satellite will also demonstrate similar 1.2Gbps intersatellite connections for the CRL's grand design, the Next-generation Low Earth Orbiting (LEO) System, or NeLs.

"The concept is difficult, particularly as NeLs is Japan's first concept for a global LEO satellite constellation. We have so many things to develop," says the Gigabit Satellite's program manager, Naoto Kadowaki. But the underlying logic is simple. Under the guise of telemedicine and education research, using the Gigabit Satellite will give Asia a free taste of communications an order of speed and bandwidth better than next decade's commercial networks such as Teledesic. "If Asia wants true gigabit level data communications, very wide bandwidth networking, or global multimedia networking, the Gigabit Satellite has the capability. Many international companies [for example Teledesic] are going to provide high capacity and good connectivity, but so can we. In a truly global network, everyone can be a sharer. Imagine that everyone on the planet can be an information provider, it's wonderful," he says.

Currently Japan foresees NeLs as a 120 satellite system concept prototyped by 2-3 Gigabit Satellites which "we assume will be launched in the 2005-6 era," says CRL Space Communication's division director Yoshiaki Suzuki. "But it is not determined yet. We are thinking of a system concept proposed by Japan, not developed by Japan as we expect that it will be built by an international consortium," he says. We get the message.

Paul Kallender is a Tokyo-based science writer. You can contact him at pkk@tkb.att.ne.jp.

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