Face-to-face and Internet Communications in R&D Activities in Japan : An Empirical Study in Kyushu

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1 Networks and Communication Studies NETCOM, vol. 16, n 1-2, 22 p Face-to-face and Internet Communications in R&D Activities in Japan : An Empirical Study in Kyushu Yoshio Arai 1 Abstract. In this paper, the spatial structure of business communications including both face-to-face contacts and telecommunications in R&D activities and the effect of the diffusion of Internet communications on the geographical settings of those activities are discussed. A comparative research on face-to-face contacts and telecommunication interactions was conducted through examining the data obtained in a survey on the business communications of research workers employed by private firms located in Kyushu, Japan. Heavy concentration of technical communications in R&D activities in Tokyo and the relatively weak attraction of Fukuoka-shi, the regional center of Kyushu, indicate that a two-layer structure model of city hierarchy concerning R&D communications is persuasive. The fact that transactions tend to concentrate in Tokyo more densely than the other media suggests that the Internet has high potential value in supporting the growth of R&D functions in the peripheral regions such as Kyushu. Keywords. R&D, Internet, Face-to-face contacts, City hierarchy Résumé. Cet article discute la structure spatiale des communications professionnelles dans le domaine des activités de recherche et de développement et les effets de la diffusion des communications à partir d Internet sur la localisation de ces activités. Une recherche comparative sur les interactions en mode face à face et sur les contacts obtenus par télécommunication est effectuée à partir d une enquête portant sur des chercheurs d entreprises privées de Kyushu (Japan). Mots clés. Recherche et Développement, Internet, Hiérarchie urbaine 1. INTRODUCTION This paper focuses on the particular mode of business communications in the research and development (R&D) activities in Japanese private firms. 1. Professor, University of Tokyo at Komaba (Department of Human Geography), 3-8-1, Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, , JAPAN. yarai@humgeo.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp.

2 6 NETCOM, vol. 16, n 1-2, Background Face-to-face interactions are often considered the most effective in R&D activities because of the importance of non-routine information in R&D processes (Hall and Ritchie, 1975 ; Tomlin, 1981 ; Smith, 199 ; Sternberg, 1999). Locating in large metropolitan areas is, therefore, a significant advantage to R&D organizations because the long distance trips to make face-to-face contacts cost both time and money. Some researchers have pointed out that private R&D organizations tend to concentrate in a few large cities in Europe and United States since the 197 s (Buswell and Lews, 197 ; Malecki, 1979a, 1979b ; Howells, 1984). In Japan, a similar tendency has also been observed since the mid-198 s. The high concentration in Tokyo is a typical example of this. More than half of all R&D organizations in Japan are located in Tokyo and its surrounding Kanto region (Ishigami, 1986 ; Mano, 1987). The communications using the Internet are rapidly diffusing because of the recent development of information and telecommunication (IT) technologies. Through this change, a new work style using telecommunication media such as e- mail becomes more popular among research workers. Potentially, Internet communications are able to reduce the advantage of large cities by reducing communication cost and making it less dependent on distance. Peripheral regions far from the national cores, therefore, can be the major beneficiaries of Internet communications Purpose In this paper, we examine the spatial structure of business communications including both face-to-face contacts and telecommunications in R&D activities, and discuss the effect of the diffusion of Internet communications on the geographical settings of those activities. For this purpose, we carried out a survey on the business communication activities of research workers employed by private firms located in Kyushu. In Kyushu, R&D organizations have increased considerably in recent decades despite its relative remoteness from Tokyo. A comparative research on face-to-face contacts and telecommunication interactions was conducted through examining the data obtained in this survey. 2. PROFILE OF KYUSHU First, we briefly summarize the profile of the Kyushu region, as the site of investigation Geography The Kyushu island is located in the Southwest corner of Japan (Figure 1). This region has roughly 15 million people and is 4 thousand square kilometers in area. It accounts for approximately 1 percent of the national land area and

3 FACE-TO-FACE AND INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS IN R&D ACTIVITIES IN JAPAN 7 population. In spite of its peripheral location, the regional economic disparity between Kyushu and Tokyo is not as great as Hokkaido or Tohoku, other peripheral regions Industry In Kyushu, only Fukuoka prefecture has a relative long history of industrial development. In the late 19 th Osaka century, the first modern steel industry in the country was introduced in this prefecture. This was accompanied by a Fukuoka Tokyo period of industrialization in the early phase of Japanese modern capitalism. After the first oil crisis in the early 7 s, Kyushu Island 5km the steel production as one of typical Figure 1. Research area and cities heavy industries that had declined rapidly. Instead of these old industries, a number of semiconductor and IC factories were located in Kyushu during the late 7 s and early 8 s (Figure 2). This region is thus called the Silicon Island Major cities Fukuoka-shi and Kitakyushu-shi are two large cities located in the Northern part of Kyushu (Figure 3). Fukuoka-shi is Kyushu s regional business center. It has numerous branch offices of not only national government but also a variety of Fukuoka-shi Kitakyushu-shi Oita-shi Nagasaki-shi Kumamoto-shi Kagoshima-shi Loca Miyazaki-shi Population 1,, 5, 2, Figure 2. IC Plants in Japan, 1985 (after The Electronic Industries Association). Figure 3. Location of major cities in Kyushu

4 8 NETCOM, vol. 16, n 1-2, 22 businesses as well as retail and service firms. Kitakyushu-shi is an industrial city with the major production site of Nippon Steel Corporation, Japan s leading company in the iron and steel production sectors. The other major cities on this island are the seats of prefectural governments. Their population size stretches from two hundred thousands up to five hundred thousands Transportation All these cities are approximately in 9-minute flight distance from Tokyo. Each prefectural center is from 1 to 4 hour away by regular train from Fukuoka-shi. The inter-city bus connections have been established lately as the highway system has been developed. 3. METHODOLOGY AND DATA 3.1. The contact system analysis The difficulty of investigating communications in R&D activities originated from its essentially non-routine characteristics, which are different from most daily routine activities such as business transactions. The contact system analysis was developed to focus on non-routine communications in business activities as well as routine communications by the Swedish research group of Lund University in 197 s (Troenqvist, 197 ; 1973). This method covers the communication activities such as face-to-face contacts, telephone calls and facsimile transactions for business meetings or information gathering in general. Goddard and his colleagues applied this survey method to the office decentralization plan of Greater London (Goddard, 1973 ; Goddard and Morris, 1976). Recently, the similar concept was applied to the analysis of knowledge-based networks among scholars (Ouwersloot and Rietvelt, 1993). Several studies in the same line have been also carried out in Japan (Ikezawa, 1995 ; Arai and Nakamura, 1996 ; 1997) Survey method We also applied the method of contact system analysis to this investigation. A questionnaire survey was conducted at the end of The questionnaire addresses detailed information on the business trips for face-to-face contacts and the usage of telephone and for technical communications in R&D activities. As a whole, this survey was planned to cover approximately three thousand engineers and researchers who belong to both governmental organizations and private firms. The questionnaire sheets were distributed to the members of selected academic societies in the field of engineering by postal mail. Same sheets were also distributed to the research staffs working in both governmental and private research institutes located in the region. 812 responses were collected finally by postal mail. In this paper, however, we put particular emphasis on 217 research workers engaging in pure R&D activities in private firms.

5 FACE-TO-FACE AND INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS IN R&D ACTIVITIES IN JAPAN 9 4. FACE-TO-FACE COMMUNICATIONS In this and the next section, the spatial characteristics of face-to-face and Internet communications are examined through our survey data. First, we will discuss on business trips for face-to-face contacts Geographical distribution of the destinations of business trips As shown in Figure 4, approximately 3 percent of business trips for technical contacts are concentrated in Tokyo. This percentage is, surprising enough, higher than the case of Fukuoka-shi itself. In another survey conducted on the white-collar employees of manufacturing firms in 1996, the trip ratio for general purposes to Tokyo was only three percent. Clearly, there is a high concentration of faceto-face contacts for technical communications in Tokyo. These data highlight the importance of information access to the national core cities as for promoting R&D activities in peripheral area such as Kyushu City hierarchy viewed in terms of technical linkages Let us consider here the structure of city hierarchy in terms of technical linkages. It is generally pointed out that Japanese cities form a hierarchy of three layers : national core - regional center - provincial center (Hino, 1987). Various social and economic activities, firmly interwoven with each other, are all structural components of this hierarchy. Fukuoka-shi can be seen as the regional center whose hinterland stretches over the whole of Kyushu area. In addition, each prefectural seat can be seen as a provincial center in its prefectural land. To examine the structure of city hierarchy in this regard, the trip generation rates to cities at each level are analyzed (Figure 5). Technical Contacts Rest of Japan Osaka 7% 1% Tokyo 3% Fukuokashi 21% Rest of Kyushu 17% Kitakyushu -shi 15% R&D staffs in the private firms in Fukuoka Prefecture in the 1997 survey Rest of Kyushu 36% General Contacts Tokyo 3% Osaka 2% Rest of Japan 3% Fukuoka-shi 33% Kitakyushu-shi 23% General staffs in the manufacturing firms in Fukuoka Prefecture in the 1996 survey Figure 4. Destination of Business Trips for Face-to-face Contacts Rate (%) Central cities of prefectures Fukuokashi Tokyo Osaka Destination Figure 5. Trip Generation Rate by Destination Cities

6 1 NETCOM, vol. 16, n 1-2, 22 The trip generation rate is defined as the percentage of total people who make one or more trip per month to a particular city. The trip generation rate to Tokyo is higher than any other destination. The trip generation rate to Osaka, another national R&D Communications Tokyo General Activities Tokyo Fukuoka-shi core city, is only about half of the rate to Tokyo. The rate to Fukuoka-shi is even lower than that of Fukuoka-shi Other Central Cities of Prefectures Figure 6. Models of City Hierarchy the other central cities of individual prefectures and the two national core cities. Fukuoka-shi is not likely to play a significant role as the information center of the whole Kyushu. From these results, it is considered that the two-layer model of city structure shown in Figure 6 is in much accordance with R&D linkages compared with the regular three-layer model of general economic trades and transactions Effect of transport infrastructure on technical linkages The two-layer model mentioned above contains many direct links between provincial centers and Tokyo. Concerning face-to-face communications, this structure suggests the existence of rather convenient transport services along these links. Kyushu had experienced rapid growth of high tech industry, such as IC plants, during the late 7 s and the early 8 s. In the same period, Ratio the number of R&D organizations 3 26 increased at significantly high rate compared to the nation as a whole 23 (National Land Agency, 1993). The 2 number of employees working for the private research firms in Kyushu nearly doubled between 1975 and 1 Kyushu (Figure 7). 5 Whole of Japan It is assumed that the improvement of transport infrastructure promoted this growth. In the 7 s, Year the runways of local airports had been expanded to accommodate jets Figure 7. Growth of Employees in Research Firms

7 FACE-TO-FACE AND INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS IN R&D ACTIVITIES IN JAPAN 11 Thousand passengers 12, 1, 8, 6, 4, 2, from Local Airports from Fukuoka Airport Year Figure 8. Annual Number of Total Flight Passengers to Tokyo (after Ministry of Transport). through the First Airport Development Program conducted by the Japanese government. In addition, the capacity of Haneda Airport in Tokyo was enlarged, when Narita Airport was opened as Tokyo s exclusive international hub in Since then, the number of direct flights between Tokyo and local airports in Kyushu increased remarkably. The growth in the number of passengers between Tokyo and the local airports except Fukuoka exceeds considerably that of Fukuoka Airport (Figure 8). This improvement seems to have contributed positively to the formation of the twolayer structure of technical linkages. 5. INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS The Internet brought a new communication medium to R&D activities. The communication cost through the Internet does not depend on the distance on both temporal and monetary terms. If Internet communications are effective in R&D processes, therefore, some local disadvantages associated with a peripheral location may be removed. In spite of a rapid diffusion of the Internet in the R&D processes, there are scarce research endeavors to focus on the real processes of the usage of the Internet. In this section, we make a positive attempt to examine the use of use as the medium of technical communications by research workers through the data obtained from our survey Diffusion of the Internet in Japan The number of Internet users in Japan is estimated to be 19 million in February 2. This number roughly doubled that of Although the number of persons using the Internet only in residence increased more than three times during the same period, the increase rate of that in offices or schools is only 49 percent (Figure 9). It Thousand persons 25, 2, 15, 1, 5, Residence only Office/School d Year Figure 9. Internet Users in Japan (after Access Media International, 1999)

8 Executive Management R&D Production Clerical Production 12 NETCOM, vol. 16, n 1-2, 22 Rate (%) 8 Rate (%) Academic International Others Whole Executive Management R&D Clerical Others Whole Figure 1. Use Rate of by Job Type. Figure 11. Use Rate of International/Academic . is, therefore, assumed that the conditions of its usage have not changed so significantly from the time of the investigation Features of the usage of by research workers The rate of usage by research workers is almost the same as workers engaging in other job types (Figure 1). However, research workers use for communications with their academic counterparts, such as researchers in local and foreign universities or research institutes, more frequently than the other general workers (Figure 11). The higher rate of communication with academic counterparts appears to prove that a new work style of gathering technical information by has diffused into various fields of the R&D process Comparison of transactions and face-to-face contacts In sequence, we will make a comparison on the geographical distribution of transactions and their counterparts, that of telephone calls and of face-toface contacts. The communication generation rate is defined here as the percentage of people who have one counterpart and more in each area for and telephone communication, and as the percentage of people who make one or more trips per month to each area for face-to-face contacts. As shown in Figure 12, the generation rate of Tokyo is the highest for every medium. It confirms that the linkages with Tokyo are exclusively important in R&D processes in the case of telecommunications as well as face-to-face contacts. To make comparison among media, the relative ratio which is defined as the ratio of the each area s rate to the whole areas rate is introduced for each medium. The transactions tend to concentrate in Tokyo more heavily than face-toface contacts and even telephone calls (Figure 13). On the other hand, the

9 FACE-TO-FACE AND INTERNET COMMUNICATIONS IN R&D ACTIVITIES IN JAPAN 13 Rate (%) Telephone Face-to-face Figure 12. Rate of Communication Generations by Medium Fukuokashi Rest of Kyushu Tokyo Osaka Rest of Japan Overseas Whole Place of Counterparts Rate (%) Telephone Face-to-face Figure 13. Relative Ratio of Communication Generations Fukuokashi Rest of Kyushu Tokyo Osaka Rest of Japan Overseas Place of Counterparts communication generation rate with foreign counterparts is obviously high in the case of . These results suggest that the Internet is useful as a communication media in R&D activities. It can therefore be confirmed that the Internet has some potentiality to promote the growth of R&D functions in the peripheral regions far from the national information cores. 6. CONCLUSION The result of this survey is summarized as follows. Firstly, technical communications in R&D activities such as face-to-face contacts, telephone calls and transactions indicate heavy simultaneous concentration in Tokyo. It is clear that the linkages to the information sources in

10 14 NETCOM, vol. 16, n 1-2, 22 the national core region should play an exclusively important role in the R&D process even in the peripheral regions. Secondly, Fukuoka-shi, the largest city in Kyushu, attracts relatively small number of interactions from the vicinity. Instead of the regular three-layer structure of the city hierarchy concerning R&D communications, but a two-layer structure of city hierarchy is rather persuasive. Thirdly, the transactions tend to concentrate in Tokyo more densely than face-to-face contacts and even than telephone calls. It can therefore be agreed that the Internet has the some potentiality as a significant means to support the growth of R&D functions in peripheral regions. However, the usefulness of face-to-face interactions to the national cores cannot be neglected as well. The transport infrastructure that provides easy access to the national cores is still of high importance. In the case of Kyushu, the expansion of airline network in the 197 s seems to stimulate considerable growth of R&D functions. Researchers have long argued about whether telecommunications can substitute face-to-face contacts. For example, Goddard and Pye (1977) examined the possibility of using telephone as a substitute for face-to-face contacts in office activities. However, face-to-face communications have remained important up to now. The Internet is said to transform the essential composition of our society (Castells, 1997, 1999 ; Adams, 1997 ; Bunn and Cottle, 1997 ; Froehling, 1997 ; Jackson and Purcell, 1997 ; O lear, 1997 ; Bunn, 1998 ; Warf and Grimes, 1998 ; Kellerman, 1999; Rimmer and Morris-Suzuki, 1999; Wilhelm, 1999). On the other hand, empirical studies on the communication patterns of the Internet carried by geographers are gradually increasing (Shiode and Dodge, 1999 ; Wheeler and O Kelly, 1999 ; Dodge and Shiode, 2). At present, however, we cannot judge whether the Internet will reduce the role of face-to-face communications or not. Long-term efforts are required to examine the impacts of the development of the Internet. REFERENCES ADAMS P.C. (1997). Cyberspace and virtual places. Geographical Review, 87(2), ARAI Y. and NAKAMURA H. (1996). Survey on spatial information flows using contact analysis method. Papers on City Planning, The City Planning Institute of Japan, 31, in Japanese with English summary. ARAI Y. and NAKAMURA H. (1997). Stability and reliability of the contact data for spatial information flows analysis. Papers on City Planning, The City Planning Institute of Japan, 32, in Japanese with English summary. BRUNN S.D. (1998). The Internet as the new world of and for geography : speed, structures, volumes, humility and civility. Geojournal, 45(1), 5-15.

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