�@

If proof were needed that the Internet is empowering women in Japan, Mari Matsunaga is surely it. She is also living evidence of how Japanese women are empowering the Internet. Some will know her name in connection with eWoman, a new Net venture launched this week. Touted as a "community" site for women, the online publication covers topics ranging from business and investment to marriage, divorce, fashion and entertainment. As editorial director, she will oversee content.

While eWoman has attracted considerable media attention, 45-year-old Matsunaga's chief claim to fame lies elsewhere in cyberspace. Most people think of her as the creative force behind i-mode, NTT DoCoMo's wireless Web service that gives users continuous Internet access on their cell phones.

Since its launch in February 1999, i-mode has taken Japan by storm, notching in excess of 10 million subscribers in just 18 months. With as many as 50,000 new customers signing up every day, it is by far and away the most successful such service in the world. All over the nation, people are using their cell phones to check the stock market, read e-mail, transfer funds, book plane tickets and download melodies. It's hip, happening and extremely handy. Matsunaga is credited with dreaming up the concept that made it all possible.

Indeed, Nikkei Woman magazine voted her Woman of the Year 2000 for her role in coming up with i-mode. What is more, customers have been flocking to buy a book she wrote about her experiences. Titled "i-mode Jiken" (The i-mode Affair: The Making of the Mega Commercial Hit of the Century), it tells how she breezed into DoCoMo as a complete outsider, turned the company's corporate culture on its head and helped develop the defining consumer product of the new millennium.

"As I wrote in the book, I'm not Superwoman," said Matsunaga, who left DoCoMo in April. "I've got a tiny body, hardly any strength. But I wanted to convey the fact that even someone with an ordinary education and ordinary skills could, given the chance, do something extraordinary. I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth, I wasn't blessed with physical strength, but if you take pleasure in your work, things happen."

She added that creating opportunities is what eWoman is all about: "I was a core member of the i-mode staff, but in Japan, women are rarely at the center when it comes to developing new products. The top management of business enterprises are still almost always men. Women rarely get higher than section chief. From an international perspective, Japan is not an advanced nation at all.

"But now that the Internet has become a tool, the idea is to help women feel that they can make the most of it...The first step is to create an online community."

To that end, Matsunaga has teamed up with writer and former TV news reporter Kaori Sasaki, eWoman's president and CEO, to create a site aimed at offering working women in their 20s and 30s information on everything from raising children to starting their own businesses. A staff of 50 will provide content for eWoman's three zones: Money & Work, Life & Family and Beauty & Entertainment.

It is too early to say how the venture will fare in the increasingly cutthroat world of cyber publishing, but Matsunaga's role-model status will surely help attract eyeballs. Taking a break from the prelaunch bustle at her office in Minami-Aoyama, Tokyo, she described how the "i-mode affair" came to happen.

Information convenience store

Back in the dark ages before the Internet and cell phones, Matsunaga had already made a name for herself as a market-savvy editor in chief at Recruit, a Tokyo-based publishing company. She was known for turning uninspiring listing magazines into unexpected money-spinners. She worked her greatest magic on Travaille, a magazine originally set up to help foster career mobility among women.

Fast forward to 1997. Across town at NTT DoCoMo, plans were in the pipeline for a new data transmission service that would let people use their cell phones for purposes other than merely talking. DoCoMo already had the lion's share of the Japanese mobile phone market, but everybody knew the wireless Web was the way of the future. Trouble was, creating a system from scratch was easier said than done.

Electrical engineer Keiichi Enoki was assigned the task of spearheading the new project. Aware of Matsunaga's reputation as an ideas person, he decided to commit corporate sacrilege and invite her aboard.

"Mr. Enoki called me and said that DoCoMo was creating a new service in which content was very important," she recalled. "I was the one they scouted out as the person to come up with that."

To headhunt from outside was irregular enough, what with a pool of 4,800-odd employees to choose from. But to bring in a 42-year-old woman with zero technical know-how sounded downright nutty. When Matsunaga joined the company in July 1997 as general manager of the company's Gateway Business Planning Department, she did not even own a cell phone.

Still, Enoki's decision paid off.

The first thing Matsunaga did was try to get the creative juices flowing around the corridors of DoCoMo, the company spun off from Nippon Telegraph and Telecommunications, Japan's former telecom monopoly, during deregulation in 1992. She insisted on conducting brainstorming sessions over beer, in meetings that would become known as "Club Mari."

"Ordinary meeting rooms have high conference tables and chairs. You can't relax there. So I said, get rid of the tables and get sofas with low centers of gravity so people could make themselves at home and get the alpha waves flowing...The idea was to get fresh air blowing in from outside," she explained. technological aspects of i-mode, as the project would soon be dubbed (according to Matsunaga, the "i" stands for Internet, information and individuality). Instead, she thought of the service in terms of "a convenience store for information." That meant not compromising on several points. Like a convenience store, it had to be "anytime, anywhere, anything." It also had to be cheap.

Thus was born the world's most advanced Internet-enabled cell phone service. Enoki and his team of engineers made Matsunaga's vision a reality, inventing the "packet communications" system, in which users pay a fraction of a yen for set packets of data rather than chunks of time. The result: no irritating dialing up. Today, i-mode users have near-instant access to 20,000 Web sites tailor-made for the small screen.

"Matsunaga is basically not a digital person. She's an analog person," said Kotaro Chiba of the Tokyo-based company Cybird, one of the largest providers of i-mode content. "She made her career as a magazine editor, work concerned with image and concept. When NTT first decided to start i-mode, they were thinking purely in terms of new technology. But ordinary people--high school students, college kids--they're not concerned with the nuts and bolts of new technology."

He added, "If you look at all the i-mode promotion, never once does the word Internet appear. For most people, the word Internet evokes images of something difficult. But this is just a new cellular phone service that seems easy and fun."

According to Tim Clark, head of the Tokyo-based e-business solutions provider Web Connection, Matsunaga's genius lay in imagining how the kind of listings information that are a staple of magazines like Travaille might be packaged for the wireless Web.

"If you look at those magazines, it's just a big database on paper," he said. "I think she was brilliant in recognizing that DoCoMo could transfer that model onto an online channel--in other words, at the same price point, offer those very handy little information services that people were already paying for."

For Matsunaga, the moral of the i-mode story is that Net Age enterprises require Net Age strategies, even if that means overhauling traditional ways of conducting business in Japan. In fact, revamping the prevailing corporate culture has become a prerequisite for success in the New Economy. For women, that equals a much more level playing field.

"The thing I most wanted to say in the book had to do with leadership," she said. "How does a leader foster an essential spirit of resolve and determination?"Tim Large Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Copyright 2000 The Daily Yomiuri