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Based on the concept of Informational Cities, which are the highly developed prototypical cities of the 21st century, we conducted a regional comparison of four Japanese cities in terms of their 'cityness' and 'informativeness'. The purpose of our articles is to specify the theoretical framework for measuring the informativeness and cityness level of any desired city, to quantify the chosen indicators in order to compare the investigated cities, and finally, to conclude what is their advancement level in terms of a modern city of the knowledge society. Our methodology is based on a new approach to measure the position of a city in a national or a global scale, originating from information science and its indicators of the knowledge society. It includes such procedures as desktop research and bibliometrics, ethnographic field study, or grounded theory method. The investigated aspects under the notion of the informativeness level are the distinct labour market and mix of companies located in the city (concerned with creative, knowledge and information economy), as well as the progressive e-governance and advanced e-government. The notion of cityness level oscillates around the concept of space of flows in the city, including the flow of money, power, information, and human capital. In order to make our model practical and grounded on available evidence, we have chosen four Japanese cities to undergo the process. Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka and Kyoto are big and economically significant Japanese metropolises. However, our results show that they differ from each other regarding many important aspects. We were able to quantify their performances and create a ranking. The limitation of our approach appears to be the strict quantification method that makes the cityness and informativeness levels of the cities dependent on other cities' performances, and that does not precisely reflect the actual dimension of the differences between them. Hence, in the future work we will develop a more flexible and independent approach, enabling us to make more accurate statements on cities' advancement unregarded the advancement level of the other metropolises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to identify factors that influence the potential demand for m-government service adoption in Japan by analysing survey responses. This study identifies smartphone ownership, mobile application activity and e-government subscription as demand drivers. These results suggest government should encourage Juki cards and the e-tax payment system adoption and support programmes to encourage smartphone ownership and mobile application subscriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While globally successful Japanese industries were able to use their domestic market as a springboard into international markets, Japan's telecommunications sector became decoupled from global markets, trapping Japanese ICT firms in the domestic market. This persistent pattern of leading without followers was not simply the result of misguided technological choices, ill-informed corporate strategies, or insular government standard-setting processes. Rather, the dynamics of competition, shaped and reshaped by political dynamics and regulatory structures, decoupled it from global markets. These dynamics created a 'Galapagos effect', in which winning in an isolated domestic market led to losing in global markets. Major regulatory shifts transformed the dynamics of competition since the late 1990s, decreasing the isolation of Japan's telecommunications sector, but some factors pulling it along a proprietary trajectory persist. This paper highlights the dilemma of how to develop beyond a follower status, but avoid becoming a leader without followers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the demand for mobile telephones including second generation (2G) and third generation (3G) by using a discrete choice model called a mixed logit model. First, we examine the substitution patterns of the demand for mobile telephones and show that demand substitutability among alternatives is stronger within the provider nest category than within the standard nest category in mobile telephone services. The closest substitute for NTT’s 3G service is NTT’s 2G service, rather than KDDI’s 3G service, for example. Second, we investigate the elasticities of demand for various functions including e-mail, Web browsing, and moving picture delivery. Consequently, we cannot observe marked differences between 2G and 3G services based on these calculated elasticities, indicating that it takes time for 3G subscribers to gain proficiency with such new services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]