In a trip that drives home the global scale of the millennium bug, President Clinton's leading Year 2000 bug guru will wing to Japan Saturday to share ideas on how to tackle the biggest computer bug in history.
John Koskinen, the chairman of the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, will be in Japan through Tuesday for the bilateral mini-summit. He plans to meet with private sector leaders and his Japanese government counterparts to assess the country's Y2K plans and share troubleshooting strategies.
"It is essential that we learn from each other's experiences and that all sectors of society be engaged in conversion efforts," said Jack Gribben, spokesman for the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion.
A position document released Tuesday by the White House, titled "US-Japan Y2K Cooperation Statement," said that, as 2000 approaches, the two nations will continue to cooperate and share information on testing and contingency planning.
Over recent months, Japan has been criticized for dragging its feet on Y2K. In May, for instance, Moody's Investors Services issued a report that raised questions about the degree of preparedness in Japan's financial industry.
"Unlike other global banks, the Japanese say that they do not have any major [Y2K] problems -- and how they achieved that happy state of affairs is a mystery," wrote analyst Ryan O'Connell in the report, titled "Heading Toward Judgment Day."
The report further warned that Japan's recession and banking meltdown had hobbled the nation, making it difficult to deal with another major crisis. To be sure, some local media outlets have reported that the Y2K problem was less severe in Japan, and therefore required less effort to solve.
Impressions weren't helped much in August when the Tokyo Stock Exchange reported that less than 10 percent of the 1,549 companies that responded to a survey had completed their Y2K bug preparations.
However, an official Japanese government action plan heartened US officials this week. Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi announced the plan on September 22.
"We are very pleased that the Prime Minister has made Y2K a top priority," said Gribben.
The bug traces its roots to the 1950s and 1960s when the computer memory came at a premium. In an attempt to save precious memory, computer programmers developed a two-digit convention for marking the passage of time. As a result, computers may mistakenly read the Year "00" as 1900 instead of 2000, potentially triggering system crashes.
Although this is the first time that a US official has visited Japan on Y2K business, Gribben stressed that the two countries have been cooperating on this issue for some time.
"This trip allows us to formalize these linkages," said Gribben. "At the end of the day, I think we'll have a better sense as to the level of Japan's preparedness."
