Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ)

Abstract

Founded on April 22, 1960, the Information Processing Society of Japan (情報処理学会, IPSJ) emerged as Japan was importing, assimilating, and then beginning to compete with Western computing technology. The IPSJ’s early work translated Western research for Japanese engineers, built the vocabulary of Japanese-language computing, and provided an institutional framework for the government-industry-academic partnership that powered Japan’s electronics industry from transistor radios through mainframes to the ambition of the Fifth Generation Project. The IPSJ’s history maps Japan’s computing trajectory precisely: enthusiastic imitation, determined improvement, industrial dominance, and then the structural difficulties that the internet era posed to a computing culture built around closed corporate systems.

Context: Japan’s Computing in 1960

When the IPSJ was founded in April 1960, Japan’s computing landscape was defined by two facts: imported hardware and determined independence.

Japan’s first electronic computers were largely built with American technology and in some cases under direct American license: IBM had established a significant presence, and Japanese companies (Fujitsu, NEC, Hitachi, Toshiba) were producing computers under license from or in competition with American vendors. The Japanese government, through MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry), was simultaneously encouraging technology transfer and protecting domestic industry, a policy tension that would define Japanese computing for three decades.

The domestic computing community in 1960 consisted of researchers at universities and government laboratories (primarily the Electrotechnical Laboratory, ETL, which built Japan’s first domestic computers), engineers at the emerging Japanese computer companies, and mathematicians and statisticians who were beginning to use computers for scientific calculation. These communities needed a shared forum, the IPSJ provided it.

Founding and Early Mission

The IPSJ was established on April 22, 1960, with Yamashita Hideo of the University of Tokyo as its first president. The trigger was institutional: the First International Conference on Information Processing in Paris in June 1959 had led to the founding of IFIP that January, and IFIP admitted countries only through national societies, so Japan needed one. Yamashita and Wada Hiroshi of the Electrotechnical Laboratory worked out the plan, and a founding assembly of 166 supporters met on March 1, 1960. The founding mission was explicitly educational as well as organizational: to disseminate knowledge of information processing in Japan, to connect Japanese practitioners with international research, and to build the vocabulary of computing in Japanese.

This last mission (building Japanese computing vocabulary) was more consequential than it might appear. Japanese technical language often borrowed directly from English (as katakana loan words) or required entirely new Japanese constructions. The choice between konpyūtā (コンピュータ, an anglicized loan word) and a native Japanese construction for various technical concepts shaped how computing was understood and taught. The IPSJ’s journals and publications, which used and standardized Japanese computing terminology, played a significant role in how Japan’s computing culture developed its linguistic framework.

IPSJ Journal (情報処理, Jōhō Shori), the society’s flagship publication, began in 1960 and provided a publication venue for computing research in Japanese, one of the few non-English research publication venues in computing that achieved genuine research quality.

The Import-and-Improve Era (1960s–1970s)

Japan’s computing strategy in the 1960s was deliberate: import the technology, understand it thoroughly, and then produce Japanese versions. This applied to both hardware and software. IBM 360s ran in Japanese universities and corporations; NEC, Fujitsu, and Hitachi produced clones and near-clones of IBM architecture while simultaneously developing Japanese-specific features.

The IPSJ provided the connective tissue for this effort. Its conferences brought together university researchers and corporate engineers who were working on similar problems: Japanese character input and display, database systems for Japanese business applications, and the numerical computing applications that drove demand for scientific computers. The IPSJ also sent delegations to international conferences (particularly IFIP) and brought international speakers to Japan, maintaining the international connection that was essential for remaining current with Western research.

The Fifth Generation Project Connection (1982–1992)

The IPSJ was closely connected to the Fifth Generation Computer Systems project, Japan’s government-funded initiative to build AI computers based on logic programming and parallel processing, launched in 1982 by ICOT (Institute for New Generation Computer Technology) with MITI funding.

The Fifth Generation Project was the most ambitious public computing research investment in history at the time of its launch, and it galvanized the international computing community. The United States and Europe responded with their own AI and computing research programs (the US Strategic Computing Initiative, the European ESPRIT program). The IPSJ provided the academic infrastructure for Japanese researchers working on the project, conferences, publications, and connections to international AI research communities.

The Fifth Generation Project did not achieve its core goal of building commercially viable parallel logic programming systems. Logic programming (Prolog) and the computational architectures designed around it proved less general-purpose than its proponents had hoped. By the late 1980s it was clear that the project would not produce the next paradigm of computing, and by 1992, when ICOT was wound down, the project was widely regarded as a failure. What the project did produce was a generation of Japanese researchers trained in logic programming, parallel computing, and AI, many of whom went on to contribute to the areas that actually became important, including machine learning and natural language processing.

A full history of the Fifth Generation Project is part of Japan’s Computing Industry.

IPSJ Awards and Recognition

The IPSJ recognizes achievement through several awards:

IPSJ Fellow: the society’s highest membership distinction, awarded annually since 1999 to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to information processing research or practice. It goes only to Japanese members; the society has no international fellows.

Paper and activity awards: the society’s Best Paper and outstanding-paper awards recognise work published in its journals and presented at its conferences, alongside awards for contributions to the society and to computing in Japan more broadly.

International Connections

The IPSJ joined IFIP as Japan’s national member organization early in its existence, giving Japanese computing scientists access to international scientific contact through the Cold War era. The IPSJ has maintained active IFIP engagement, with Japanese computing scientists serving in IFIP technical committees and as IFIP officers.

IPSJ’s relationship with ACM and IEEE Computer Society developed gradually. Japanese researchers publishing in ACM and IEEE venues became more common as English-language publication became increasingly important for international recognition. The tension between publishing in IPSJ Journal (Japanese, nationally important) and ACM/IEEE venues (English, internationally prestigious) is a persistent feature of Japanese academic computing culture.

The IPSJ maintains bilateral agreements with several Asian computing societies, particularly the China Computer Federation (CCF) and the Korean Institute of Information Scientists and Engineers (KIISE), and is a founding member of the Asia-Pacific Alliance of Computer Societies alongside CCF, KIISE, the Singapore Computer Society, and the Hong Kong Computer Society.

Modern IPSJ

The IPSJ has roughly 20,000 members (19,636 as of March 2012, of whom 16,944 were regular members, 2,446 students, and 246 corporate), reflecting both Japan’s large computing workforce and the competitive pressures on national professional societies. Japan’s most active computing research communities (machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, human-computer interaction) publish primarily in international venues and attend ACM/IEEE conferences, reducing the central role of IPSJ conferences in the research community’s life.

IPSJ’s strongest continuing functions are: providing a Japanese-language publication venue for research that does not require international reach; organizing networking for Japan’s practitioner computing community; engaging with Japanese government and industry on computing policy; and maintaining connections to Japan’s computer science education system. The society also maintains an important archive and historical function, the documentation of Japan’s computing history in Japanese is a uniquely IPSJ contribution that no international organization provides.

Info

Japan’s computing culture remains unusually domestic in orientation compared to, for example, India’s: Japanese computing professionals are less internationally mobile, Japanese companies are less internationally known despite technical sophistication, and Japanese computing research is more often published in Japanese than the research of comparably-sized computing communities in Korea or China. The IPSJ reflects and reinforces this domestic orientation.