Japan is the only country in the world to adopt an official era naming system. Although “Reiwa” started in the Spring of 2019 with the English interpretation of “beautiful harmony,” it met a world facing unprecedented and accelerating global challenges and change. One driver and source of these groundswells is the progress of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This chapter presents a Japan-focused snapshot of the interplay between technology, education and society at the start of the 2020s.

Reiwa

In June 2019, the Cabinet Office of Japan’s government1 put into print the goal of creating a society that can adapt to, safely use, and capitalize on the capabilities and promise of AI. Their language may be flat, but the goals are vertiginous: “to redesign society in every way including Japan’s human potential, social systems, industrial structures, innovation systems and governance.” The Cabinet Office suggests that a human-centric society that capitalizes on AI and the Internet of Things (IoT) in this way will realize what it calls “Society 5.0.”

We examine this “Society 5.0” naming and review the state of progress in AI. We will see that educationally there is a significant challenge to teaching the subject. We then look at the AI-related research and education reforms that Japan is already rolling out. Finally, we review the third-party evaluations of Japan’s state of readiness.

Society 5.0

Product numbering is useful in the fast-changing world of software and hardware development. We write in the time of the iPhone 12. Current readers may have a memory of releases as low as four, five or 5S. Readers in the future may struggle with such low digits, or maybe the numbers will no longer mean anything at all.

The presence of “versioning” numbers on things that are not hardware or software is just one example of how technology affects not only our material environment but also our thoughts. The roots go back to Tom O’Reilly’s popularizing of the term “Web 2.0” when starting the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference with Dale Dougherty in 2004. He later went on to try a similar treatment in politics with the 2009 Gov2.0 summit. In this usage, “2.0” is shorthand for a different or improved version.