Konnichiwa. I'm Jackie Friedman, and I work in the Asia Pacific Group at WebTV Networks. We are busy getting ready to launch the WebTV service in Japan later this year. Our goal is to bring the same high quality WebTV experience to subscribers in Japan. Of course, there are some substantial changes we have to make first! I've outlined below a few interesting differences we are working on now.

Language: It seems like a basic assumption that when you run a service in Japan it has to be in Japanese. That small assumption is keeping us very busy, since the Japanese language is a complex animal different from English and all other Western languages. There are three major components to writing in Japanese: kanji, hiragana, and katakana. Kanji are the thousands of characters or ideograms derived from Chinese which are used as the base of most nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The much simpler hiragana alphabet has 46 letters. Hiragana have two uses: 1) they modify kanji characters, providing the verb and adjective conjugations, identifying parts of speech, etc. and 2) they occasionally are used for words of Japanese origin. There are also 46 katakana letters which sound the same as hiragana, but look different. Katakana is used for writing words borrowed from other languages. There are many words in Japanese that came from English, including Internet, keyboard, beer, wine, pizza and cake. Finally, Japanese use the Roman alphabet, called romaji, for acronyms, abbreviations, and English slogans. Travelers in Japan often remark on how much wacky English they see on signs and advertisements. "Let's kiosk" is the name of the snack-stands found in most of the train stations. When you combine all of these character sets you get written Japanese. An average page in a Japanese newspaper, for example, will have approximately 70% kanji, 20% hiragana, 10% katakana and a sprinkling of romaji.

You can probably imagine what fun we had deciding how to translate WebTV into Japanese. The Japanese word for TV is terebi. It is a katakana word that comes from the first three syllables of television and is pronounced te-le-bee. We thought about WebTerebi spelled in katakana and other Japanese variations. But when we spoke with our Japanese counterparts at the WebTV office in Tokyo and with many Japanese magazine editors, we learned that they liked the sound of WebTV as is without any Japanization. We decided to stick with the name WebTV and to use romaji. If you're ever reading the paper in Japan, look for WebTV; you should be able to recognize that word, at least!

Our Japanese users also have to be able to write in Japanese, and we have been creating a keyboard especially for them that includes the hiragana and katakana characters on a QWERTY keyboard. We are working on a character input method so that they can enter characters either phonetically using romaji or in kana. We have character dictionaries in the system that recognize the phonetics and will generate kanji options for each character. It sounds like writing is a slow process in Japanese, but with a good input method, good dictionaries, and lots of practice, you can actually get pretty good at it.

Payment: We are still considering payment options in Japan. In the US, you pay for your WebTV Network service either by credit card or by check. In Japan, no one uses personal checks. Instead, it is very common to transfer money through a direct bank transfer. When I lived in Japan, I bought airplane tickets to go home by going to my local ATM and inserting the account number of my travel agent. The money was promptly transferred and the travel agent notified. Many bills, such as electricity and phone, can also be paid at convenience stores like the local 7-11. In big cities, you can find a convenience store every two to three blocks. While credit cards exist in Japan, people use them less frequently than in the US. We are taking this all into account as we decide on the various payment methods for the WebTV Network in Japan.

Telephone service: Like the US, Japan has a developed phone system and almost all households have a phone line (even though a line costs over $600 to buy!). There are some differences that we have had to keep in mind, though. Unfortunately for WebTV Network subscribers in Japan, the telephone company (NTT) charges for local calls. We expect this might make users conscious of how long they have been online. We are working on some features that will help them monitor this, and maybe even allow them to enjoy some of the service without being connected all of the time. NTT does offer a special flat rate period. If you sign up (and pay!) for the TeleHodai service, you can make calls to a selected local number between 11 pm and 8 am. TabeHodai is used at buffets and means all-you-can-eat, NomiHodai is used at parties and means all-you-can-drink, TeleHodai is a term coined by NTT and implies all-you-can-telephone. We expect that many of our users will want to get the TeleHodai service, if they don't have it already.

We know many of our subscribers in the US have call-waiting and use the call-waiting feature. In Japan, NTT offers a similar feature called "catch phone" since it allows you to "catch" an incoming call when you're on the other line. We plan to support this feature in Japan as well, although it does call for some engineering work since turning on and off catch phone works differently in Japan than it does here in the US.

The Home Page: If you saw the Japanese WebTV Network, would you recognize it? Probably. We plan to keep much of the same look and feel. Of course, we will tailor it for the Japanese market. For example, several of the icons will be different. The icon for e-mail will be changed, since the mailbox we are using in the US is an American mailbox. The content in the Explore directory will also all be localized for the Japanese market, and will focus on the great Japanese sites available. You will still see categories such as sports and music, but you can expect to find sumo sites and Japanese karaoke sites within.

We'll keep you posted as our WebTV Japan service gets started. In the meantime, if you want to know more about Japan in general, check out these sites.