The Information Society as Post-Industrial Society

Masuda's book represents the Japanese vision of deliberately engineering the transition to an information society, developed in the context of the MITI-sponsored plans that guided Japan's postwar industrial policy. Unlike Western theorists who described the information society as an emergent phenomenon, Masuda treated it as a design problem: something a nation could plan for, invest in, and build through coordinated public-private action. He proposed a "Computopia" organized around voluntary communities linked by information networks, where the goal of economic activity would shift from material consumption to the realization of time-value — the qualitative use of time freed by automation. The book is both visionary and historically specific, reflecting the confidence of late-1970s Japan in state-guided technological development. Reading it today, the utopianism is striking but not naive — Masuda was explicit about the institutional conditions required for his vision, which is more than most contemporary futurists manage. It remains a valuable counterpoint to the Anglo-American assumption that information societies emerge spontaneously from market forces.