The party that was held on February 2nd in Velfarre, Tokyo's fashionable night spot, is fast assuming the historic significance in Japan's business community of a Boston Tea Party, an event which defined a revolution.
Thousands of young Japanese university graduates and a scattering of foreigners crushed in, not for club music, but to hear Mr Masayoshi Son, founder of Internet giant, Softbank, and Japan's leading Internet investor and dot.com warrior.
"The most amazing opportunities await you," Mr Son cried. "Japan is going through its biggest social upheaval since the Meiji Restoration (the period in 1968 when Japan modernised)". The crowd cheered. Yet not everyone shared the delirium. In the balcony a suited Japanese banker looked down glumly.
"Aren't you excited?" someone asked. He replied, "Look at all those foreigners, influencing the young people."
Like it or not, old Japan is being exposed to an Internet revolution which is sweeping the country like a tsunami, and it is heavily influenced by "foreigners", not least Mr Son himself, a 42-year-old ethnic Korean brought up in a poor Japanese village and now the richest man in the land of the rising sun.
But the real undermining of old corporate values is being done by a new generation of home-grown "start-up kids", Japanese who are now rejecting secure, traditional careers as salarymen in keiretsu - the old exclusive networks of venerable Japanese companies.
These adventure capitalists, researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs, academics and students are seeking their fortunes in exhilarating places like Bit Valley, a high-tech section of Tokyo known as Shibuya - which means Bitter Valley in Japanese - where over 400 Internet ventures have set up shop. They regularly swop ideas at non-virtual gatherings such as the one in Velfarre, though now TV crews show up as well.
In their fast-talking company it is hard to believe that Japan is still struggling to emerge from recession, and that established blue-chip industries are suffering from decline and restructuring. Stock prices of information companies have rocketed upwards on soaring expectations, as international fund managers seek out the hottest dot.com start-ups and prepare for the launch in June of Nasdaq Japan. The old inhibitions on entrepreneurship do not apply to them. "There are no bureaucrats dealing with the Internet industry, it's so open it scares me," said Mr Frank Seiji Sanda, chairman, president and CEO of Japan Communications, a major telecommunications service provider for the corporate market.
Over lunch at one of Shibuya's most popular restaurants - Nobu, co-owned by Robert de Niro - he predicted that soon stock prices rather than old-style contacts would determine the fate of companies in Japan. "Outside pressure is needed to change things in Japan," said Mr Sanda. "It's called gaiatsu - heat from outside."
Nevertheless the old guard representing the still dominant Japan Inc is resisting the overhaul of the economy which should result from the explosion in the information sector. It is backed by a public which perceives deregulation as the harbinger of instability.
US ambassador, Tom Foley, tells how he once praised the lower-price benefits of deregulation to a meeting of parliament deputies, only to be interrupted by one who said it would be better if the ambassador emphasised the new industries and jobs it would bring, as most Japanese people didn't mind paying a little extra, as long as the old certainties such as secure employment were maintained.
This type of resistance, and high interconnection charges which make Internet access up to 10 times more expensive in Tokyo than in the US, made Japan slow to embrace the new technology in the 1990s. Comparatively few homes have personal computers, though the number of Internet users soared from nine to 18 million (out of a population of 123 million) in the last three years, and the number of home Internet users from 1.2 million to more than six million.
Now it is adapting the Internet revolution to its own requirements. Japan has 54 million mobile phone users, approaching half the total population. The Shibuya set send short messages via software developed by the Irish company Aldiscon, recently acquired by Logica of the UK.
Most young people in Tokyo have I-phones, on which they can access the Net.
"Soon they will be able to surf the Web to find concert tickets, go to the store and point and click the handset at the till to pay," said Mr Dermot Killoran, president of PTS Co Ltd.
Mr Killoran, who first came to Japan from Ireland on an EU executive programme, is an example of successful Irish enterprise riding the IT tsunami in Japan. He risked all to establish his computer training business in Tokyo in 1993, serving mostly multinational companies, and by 1999 it was generating $18 million (#18.83 million) in annual revenues. Datacraft Asia, one of the Asia region's biggest networking and communications system integrators, recently acquired a 75 per cent stake in PTS for $23.6 million.
Such examples of personal enrichment have helped encourage new thinking among the brightest Japanese go-getters. "The market is very hot for establishing Internet setups, and we are now seeing a lot of new entrepreneurs," said Mr Killoran, who has a Japanese wife, Yumiko, and four children. "A lot of money is chasing these people. Much of it is coming from the United States, where they are taking the view that if the Internet made hundreds of millionaires in the biggest economy in the world, what about the second biggest? Now Japanese institutional money is being poured in as well."
Japan's island culture made its embrace of the Internet different from the US and Europe. Almost every street has a Seven-Eleven or other convenience store, and most of the 50,000 such outlets nationwide are planning to install multimedia e-commerce kiosks and arrange for delivery and payments in the store.
Japan also has a high level of catalogue sales which are ripe for transfer to the Internet. With street crime almost unknown people like calling at the neighbourhood stores late at night, and according to surveys prefer to pick up books or other purchases at convenience stores rather than their homes.
The Seven-Eleven phenomenon could promote consumer e-commerce to take off in a big way. "These changes will drive the Japanese economy and make massive shifts," Mr Killoran predicted, "and they provide tremendous possibilities for Irish software companies".
Mr Terrie Lloyd, a native of New Zealand and founder of Linc Media, which offers Internet marketing advice and software services, and publishes an Internet journal, J@pan.Inc, said: "For Western companies, now is a great time to come into Japan and grab market share in an Internet sector, because Japanese companies for the most part just don't get it. The Japanese don't believe in the Internet yet."
While the keiretsu of corporate Japan may not have come to terms with the Internet, some of the big companies have become believers, like Sony and Fujitsu, Japan's leading Internet service provider. Japanese investment in information lags 10 years behind the US, but it has raced ahead in mobile telecommunications, mobile access to the Internet and third generation (3G) phone systems, said Mr Declan Collins of Enterprise Ireland in Tokyo.
Japanese companies like DoCoMo and Nomura have not been a major force in the overseas mobile telecom market, leaving the first wave of activity to Nokia and Ericsson and Motorola, but all that is about to change with 3G, he said.
"Europe has not woken up to the challenge, particularly companies supplying software and equipment for the current mobile telecom market in Europe or the antiquated wired telecom market in the US," Mr Collins said.
"Japan leads the way in 3G and will advance into Asia, Europe and last, but not least, the US, which is judged to be about three years behind Japan at this stage." Mr Collins added that "Irish companies need to sit up and take notice".
He pointed out that other investment opportunities for Irish companies were the hundreds of "network server farms" being created to support groups of companies with application service providers to rent out software as needed. Mr Sanda also commented, "if the Irish economy is going to sustain itself it must look beyond to developments in places like Japan".
With all the excitement generated by the 21st century version of the Meiji Restoration, economists are having a hard time figuring out whether Japan is recovering or not after a decade in the doldrums. The stock market hit a two-year high in February, helped by an infusion of $84 billion from foreign investors, yet the head of Japan's Economic Planning Agency, Mr Taichi Sakaiya, estimates that the overall economy shrank in the last quarter of 1999. The Japanese stock market rose by more than 40 per cent last year, but seven of 10 old-style companies were trading at below their levels a year ago, and banks, real estate companies, department stores and the construction industry performed poorly.
Unemployment remains stuck around 4.7 per cent, and spending by workers has dropped. There is also a risk of a backlash against the Internet boom from the political system in Japan, which is sustained by interest groups which need protection from the scandal-ridden bureaucracy.
Information technology alone may not sustain a recovery in Japan, and so far the revolution has not raised productivity throughout the economy as it did in the US. But it could be that it has come just in time to prevent the weak fundamentals of the Japanese economy causing it to slip further into recession.
