Finding Japanese Business and Technology Information on the Web -- In English
Finding useful information on the World Wide Web might not be a problem for persons with fast access and lots of time on their hands. For busy professionals using ordinary phone lines, though, the Web can be almost useless as a serious business rese
arch tool... unless you know where to start.
by Steven Myers
The World Wide Web has become an indispensable research tool for countless corporations and individuals, but the vast majority of users still seem to feel that, while it is certainly entertaining and diverting, the Web has a long way to go before it li ves up to the stature of "information superhighway." The problem is not a dearth of information, but too much. The almost total lack of organization and filtering means that there is no way to consistently find the information you need without d oing a lot of aimless wandering.
Unless, that is, you know where and how to look. To make the most effective use of the Web for business and market research, it is not enough to rely on standard search engines. You need to compile your own list of sites that provide indexed, archived reports and news articles related to your area of interest. These sites often will have internal search engines that are quite accurate and useful (owing to their highly restricted coverage).
Finding good sites, though, can be a frustrating and time-consuming activity -- which is why Computing Japan would like to offer some help with Japan-related sites. This article presents just a few of the very best Web sites with Engli sh-language reports, newsbriefs, and articles about business and technology developments in Japan. We've plowed through the huge meta-indexes for Japan-related sites and sat through all the "404 Error" messages and broken links to separate the w heat from the chaff.
The bad news is that the list of what we consider truly useful English-language sites turns out to be pretty short. On the positive side, though, more and more Japanese publications and organizations are starting to provide content in English, and we e xpect the list of strong, content-oriented sites to grow.
This article concentrates on specialized sites rather than the large "one-stop shopping" Japan-related sites that try (usually unsuccessfully) to cater to everyone. While the more general sites (with their hundreds of links) can be useful in some circumstances, they are best employed mainly to guide you to the more specialized sites that have a specific focus.
Ideally, a news-oriented Web site should provide an indexed archive of all articles and news items that can be quickly searched by topic or keyword. The current reality, however, is that few sites have achieved this level of user-friendliness; you will
still have to do a fair amount of scanning through article titles in order to find what you need.
Newsbytes Pacifica
The Newsbytes Pacifica site, from Island Telecommunications Corporation, features an excellent selection of newsbriefs related to computing and telecommunications in Asia, with particular emphasis on Japanese technology. The news is updated daily, and an indexed archive of all briefs since January 1996 is online. The site uses Excite's search engine for all of its indexed content.
Nikkei Business Publications
http://www.nikkeibp.com/NEWS/tech.html
This URL takes you directly to the News Archives - Technology section of Nikkei BP's site. When we last accessed it, the section contained English summaries of about 20 articles taken from the March, April, and May issues of Nikkei Computer, Nikkei Open Systems, and Nikkei Communications. While quantity may be lacking, the quality of the content is high. There is no search function yet -- but then again, there's not that much to search. The site contains a Business section that has summar ies of articles taken from Nikkei Business over the same time frame.
Nikkei Net
http://www.nikkei.co.jp/enews/
Nikkei Net is one of the best Web sources for English-language business news in Japan. It features daily newsbriefs from the Nihon Keizai Shimbun; archived briefs from past issues start from May 18, 1996. Short summaries of stories from Nikke i Weekly as well as the full text of the cover story from each issue dating back to January 1996 can also be found on this site. Nikkei Net is not yet searchable.
Tokyo Kaleidoscoop
Despite the tabloid name, this site provides an excellent assortment of business news, primarily in the form of weekly briefs, archived from February 1996. You'll also find a scattering of articles from Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun dating back to Novemb er 1994. Like Newsbytes Pacifica, Tokyo Kaleidoscoop has configured an Excite search engine for their site, so you won't have to scan through all of the headlines and titles as you do with the Nikkei site.
JETRO
http://www.jetro.go.jpThe Japan External Trade Organization site is neither searchable nor particularly easy to navigate, but it does contain interesting archived articles from the JETRO newsletters Focus Japan, TradeScope, and JETRO Update. Unfortunate ly, articles online when we checked in June were no more recent than September 1995, and they are archived back only to September 1994. Still, with a little work, this site could become a highly useful source of business and market information.
The meta-indexes
Over the past year, several large "Japan Web Directory" sites have emerged, sites dedicated to gathering and classifying URLs for Japan-related information. Most newcomers to the Web start their search for information on a particular topic by using a meta-index site dedicated to a broader category.
If you have the time to explore and don't mind frequent dead ends and long waits, these sites can provide you with a good feel for what's out there. There is almost no filtering on a meta-index, however, so you'll often have to wander down several blin d alleys before finding something useful. In addition to numerous outdated and useless links, Japan-related meta-indexes invariably list a large number of interesting-looking sites with English titles that turn out to contain Japanese-only text.
Those warnings noted, the two most useful Japan-related meta-indexes we've come across are the Japan Information Network's Japan Web Navigator (http://jin.jcic.or.jp/navi/) and Taki Naruto's Japan-related links page (http://www.panix.com/~tn/japan.html). Both of these directories cover an extensive range of sites (2,000-plus URLs), are nicely organized, and are kept reasonably current. Taki Naruto's site is an especia lly strong source of Japanese science- and technology-related links, and it conveniently includes a note next to all of the URLs for Japanese-language-only sites.
The search engines
Like the meta-indexes, search engines -- both English- and Japanese-based -- are helpful for letting you know where many of the important sites are, but they will seldom lead you directly to a useful article or document. Usually, once you find a pertin ent site, you'll still have to use an internal search engine or index within that site to find the specific information that you're looking for.
There are just too many documents on the Web at present, and thousands of new ones appearing every day, for even the fastest and most sophisticated of the general-purpose search engines to keep up. This situation should improve as more and more money g ets poured into natural language research; for the time being, though, it's at best a two-step process: search to find the site, then search again within the site.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of sites do not have their own search engines, which causes a huge amount of valuable information to be rendered virtually inaccessible. Furthermore, most of the search engines currently being used within individual sit es are still in the developmental stages, and they will often return even more useless documents than the general-purpose engines. When we tried using the Excite search engine on the Japan Press Network (run by the Internet Access Center), for example, wh at we got back was a long list of "Document Unavailable" links that referenced the IAC home page.
As Shaun Lawson noted in the May 1996 issue of Computing Japan ("An Introduction to Japanese Search Engines," page 37), most Japanese search engines have not yet built up very large document databases. They also suffer from several add itional difficulties involved with parsing Japanese text and determining which sites are likely to store Japanese or Japan-related information. Plus, they are too popular; we had considerable trouble even accessing some of these engines, and the ones we c ould access often returned "server overload" messages.
Improvements on the Computing Japan site
In summary, the English-language sites described in this article are the best that we've found so far for conducting Japan-related business or market research. Of course, for business and technology news and views, you should be sure to start at the Computing Japan Web site (http://www.computingjapan.com). In addition to a searchable index of all issues, we've recently HTML-ized and indexed our newsbriefs archives for all of 1994 and 1995.
A slightly more ambitious project that we've recently embarked on is development of a bilingual search engine dedicated solely to finding documents of the type described in this article. We will screen the content so that only links to pertinent docume nts at relevant sites are returned.
Finally, don't forget to check out the online version of this article. Please add any comments or tips about other great sites for Japanese business and technology information that you have come across. We'll be keeping a log of reader comments as well
as a manageable, up-to-date list of direct links to the absolute best sites.
