Outline of the Keynote Personal 2

• Corporate Advisor, NTT DoCoMo, Inc.

Backed by the prevalence of ADSL, CATV and fiber-optic cables, broadband services are rapidly becoming central to Japanese society. The advent of a so-called "ubiquitous network society" in which anyone can access information anytime and anywhere is seen as a step toward the age of Information Renaissance, when state-of-the-art IT, perfected through years of technical innovations, will become available to the extent that it revolutionizes our society and culture.

To maximize the potential of IT, I would say that it would be our responsibility to make the IT network widely available to the entire Asian region, and already, some actions have been taken towards this goal. At the government level, for example, the Asia Broadband Plan is currently under way. This is part of the e-Japan Plan advocated by the IT Strategic Headquarters of the Japanese Government, and currently an action plan to build a next-generation Internet network in the Asia region is close to being established. As well, a company named Asia Internet Holdings Co., Ltd. was founded to undertake construction and management of an Internet backbone network that provides direct and interactive communications among the Asian and Pacific countries and regions. Further, as a next step, we must promote the exchange of information, technologies, and human resources among Asian countries and regions so that the entire Asian region will be able to relate with the U.S. and EU on an equal basis.

Finally, we should ensure that further development of the IT network will contribute to the creation of a society that allows each member to exercise his or her own unique ability to their fullest extent, and to freely demonstrate their intellectual creativity and sensitivity for self-fulfillment. The ultimate objective that we, corporate managers, must pursue is to develop just such a movement, globally, first from Japan to Asia, and then from Asia to the entire world.