Utagawa Hiroshige, a representative ukiyo-e artist of the late Edo period, specialized in early portraits of actors and beautiful women, but in his later years he produced masterpieces of landscapes. His first work, “Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō,” published between 1835 and 1836, was a huge hit, with over 20,000 copies printed. Driven by this popularity, he created “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo” shortly before his death at the end of the Edo period.
This set of 119 panels depicts the landscapes of Edo, characterized by its bold perspectives, with a significant number of panels depicted from a bird’s-eye view. For example, “Ryōgoku Fireworks” depicts the fireworks from above, rather than from above. “Fukagawa Suzaki Jumantsubo” depicts the marshes below and Mount Tsukuba in the distance from the perspective of a hawk soaring overhead, providing a fresh perspective.
I’ve introduced ukiyo-e, a topic seemingly unrelated to the information society, as a prelude to explaining how social understanding varies greatly depending on one’s perspective. American computer scientist A. Kay once famously said, “The perspective from which one observes things is equivalent to an IQ of 80.” This means that the perspective from which one observes an object largely determines the outcome.
Here’s one example: a map called “Map of the Circum-Japan Sea Countries” published by Toyama Prefecture in 2004. Unlike typical maps, north is at the top. Instead, this map is rotated 90 degrees, with east at the top, west at the bottom, north on the left, and west on the right, with the Sea of ​​Japan located in the center. This map clearly shows Japan’s relationships with China, the Korean Peninsula, and Russia.
Japan is not alone; most countries around the world have built male-dominated societies. However, they are currently rapidly shifting toward gender equality and female-led societies. Even in this respect, Japan is lagging behind. The World Economic Forum’s “Gender Gap Report (2025),” which compares the degree of gender equality in education, health, politics, and economics, ranks Japan 118th out of 148 countries.

Japan has been vaguely characterized as a country with a small gap between rich and poor. However, in the Gini Coefficient (2023), which calculates wealth disparity, Japan ranks 30th, and in the Gender Gap Index (2025), which measures gender disparity, Japan ranks 118th. While the comparison may be debatable, Japan is ranked lower in Asia than South Korea (101st) and China (103rd).

In “Global Digital Competitiveness,” which evaluates a country’s strength in the information society and is the subject of this paper, Japan ranked 20th in 2013, when it was first published by a Swiss research institute. However, its ranking has declined year by year, dropping to 30th last year. For comparison, the top Asian countries are Singapore (3rd), Hong Kong (4th), Taiwan (10th), China (12th), and South Korea (15th).
There’s a term called the “boiled frog phenomenon,” but humans are also insensitive to slow change. Older people, haunted by the glorious 1990s and 2000s, tend to overlook the reality that Japan is lagging behind in the digital age, but we need to recognize the real situation in the world and make a change. To do this, we need to adopt a bird’s-eye view of the world from high above, like a Steller’s sea eagle.

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