Thankfully, Tokyo Classified isn't a computer magazine. Happily, you are probably not a techie. Your main problem with a desktop stretches to getting the box of junk to print a simple letter without crashing. But, boy, do we have news for you.

If you don't already know, this is briefly what the Y2K problem is.

Back in the '60s and '70s, mainframes ran on Kilobits of memory. Nerds, often hacking up programs in languages like COBOL, saved memory space by only using two digits to indicate years. Then they assumed things. They thought those would be long gone by 2000. As did their successors, building in the bug into increasingly complex and vital software. As did their successors, right up until about yesterday, when they all started panicking in the realization that everyone was charging at 500 Megahertz processing speeds straight into the electronic Number of the Beast - 31:12:99. Unless checked, tweaked, trashed or kicked, many computers could misread 1:1:2000 as the Year Zero. And the result could plunge the world into a Millennium Maelstrom of havoc and chaos that even Pol Pot never imagined.

What will this mean for you? Will your alarm clock work? Will the trains run? Will you try to print a document, and instead of the computer crashing as usual, have it blow up and fuse, showering you in sparks and toxic gasses? Ho-ho-ho, ain't we got fun.

"I'm afraid. I'm afraid....my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going...I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm afraid...
Daisy, Daisy,
Give me your answer do.
I'm half crazy, all for the love of you..."
(HAL's response when surviving crew member pulls the plug.)


THE GOOD NEWS

Home computing
Last month's Viz magazine carried the following letter:

"Terrified by all the recent hype about the Millennium Bug I stuffed Aspirins into my disk driver and poured Lemsip over my keyboard. Now my F*****g computer's broken. The Government have got it wrong again."

The terrible, shocking, catastrophic news
How safe, reliable, fiddled and tweaked are everything from Haneda's air traffic control systems to your bank account?

The dreadful news, according to Dr. Kazuhiro Gotoh, a senior analyst at the Asia Pacific Information Technology Program (ATIP), is that nobody knows. And the reason why nobody knows is:
a) because, really, nobody knows; including the government and most of the people who are supposed to, and
b) few - at least on the Japanese side-are telling the truth about the size and extent of the problems that could be caused by the mother of all glitches.

Instead, says Gotoh, the government, bureaucracy and many Japanese companies are trying to Fudge the Bug.

"We are really concerned about the issue," he says, because the government and bureaucracy are almost completely ignorant about the threat. They assume that if they issue orders and "ministerial guidance," the problem will be resolved.

The government sends out vague questionnaires. Respondents, especially local governments, send replies like "everything is OK." The report is filed. Everyone is seen to do their job.

"And when it all goes wrong, nobody will be accountable," he laments.

Gotoh ought to know. As a non-profit research institute that monitors science developments, the ATIP has a long track record of sneaking insightful peeks into Japan's technology fortresses. Gotoh, we kid you not, is stocking up on a supply of non-perishable goods, bottled water, a spare gas stove, gas canisters and ready cash to survive up to two weeks. He, like many other experts, believes that Japan's utilities have got it wrong.

The financial impact: the bug could bite hard
The numbers for Japan are "scarce" (a polite way of saying that without a consolidated accounting basis, Japan is a nation run on funny money). However, Gartner Group and DataQuest estimate the world cost of correcting everything at USd600 billion (about the cost of the Vietnam War). Post-trauma litigation: USD300 billion. Lost productivity: USD1.6 trillion. Independently, Edward Yardeni of Deutsche Bank Securities estimates the damage on the US economy to be about USD300 billion, or 3.7 percent of GDP, or having about the same impact as the '73-'74 Oil Shock. (The Fed estimates 0.3 percent.) Yardeni, perhaps the figurehead of informed doomsayers, rates the chances of the Bug triggering a worldwide recession at 70 percnet. Only God knows what will happen to Japan.

The Japanese media isn't clueless. The Nikkei Sangyo Shimbun printed the alarming news back in '97 that at least 70 percent of Japanese companies deemed "in need" of managing the Y2K had made no preparation, or were only "investigating" the issue. Twenty months later, even the dopey Daily Yomiuri, finally waking up, found that...

The essential problem is that nobody is talking about the Bug and we can't be sure what is/ isn't being done. When the chips go down, we'll just have to rely on others. You know, like the same techies who created the monster, and the fearless leadership of our impressive PM, Keizo Obuchi, backed by his fully accountable army of bureaucrats, to make sure Japan's fifty-odd nuclear reactors don't blow up.


SECTOR-BY-SECTOR BREAKDOWN (sic)

Power
Will your dambo blow up? How about Monju? (It already nearly has). Will you be able to make a cup of coffee?

Japan has twelve major electrical, four gas and twenty-eight petroleum-producing companies, and over fifty nuclear reactors. Energy companies say that "no dates are used in the generation or distribution of electricity or gas." What sort of an idiot-savant statement is that? But they admit the Bug may kill their control and maintenance systems.

The most recent government survey (December 1998), says that of the big 44:

Electricity

Gas

Water

Nukes

There are no separate reports available on the Y2K status of Japan's nuclear power plants. Reactors and instrumentation are based on US commercial designs with Japanese "enhancements." Japan has the world's only molten sodium-spraying breeder reactor. Its nuclear industry is regulated by the STA, which managed to cover up the existence of a huge leaky swimming pool-full of radioactive waste until 1997. Then it got caught. Now the STA is mid-way through being abolished. Consider moving from Fukui, or pray the wind is blowing out to sea.

Wait for the blackout
Gotoh of ATIP accuses Japan's electricity makers of the three cardinal sins which will lead to Bug disaster:
a) habitual secrecy: conscious non-disclosure as a part of an unconscious cover-up;
b) embarrassment: Japanese industry is hiring US software expertise wholescale. It can't admit publicly that it doesn't know what it's doing. Help is at hand, but it's Gaijin;
c) over-confidence: a la Titanic.

The key problem, he says, is that doubts remain if companies have the resources to check all their peripheral systems. But any apparently non-critical system in a power plant which contains a hidden "clock," a timing device, may blank, triggering a potential systemic shutdown. With nuclear reactors, for example, core critical systems will have been checked; but far off, some obscure sluice gate may close, resulting in, it is hoped, a controlled shutdown.

Gotoh says that the chance of a partial blackout is probable. A complete blackout is possible, with a worst-case scenario of two weeks to get the juice back on amid the chaos. One thing you can be sure of-customer billing will still work.

Transport
The police, JR and subways all report they are on top of the problem. For example the TMPD's sophisticated traffic control center, which regulates a complex network of infrared beacons, is said to be bullet-proof. The police say even individual traffic light clocks will be OK. We can trust that the Yamanote line's signaling system won't cast us New Millennium drunks, en masse, into Tokyo Bay. All this becOMEs academic if there is No electricity. (OMEN)

Banks
Banks sit in the high street and take our money. How hard is that? Too hard apparently, because they're broke, and we're bailing them out.

On the other hand, banks' notorious inefficiency may well be their strength. Behind the veneer of electronic wizardry, banks here require staff to manually check the entire day's transactions-bleary-eyed OLs and chain-smoking oyaji sit there tapping out the figures on their Casios. Japan's trillions of dollars in bad loans may trigger a world financial crisis, but the potential Y2K version will not originate from Tokyo. So confident is the author in Japanese banks' abilities to handle Y2K he already opened and transferred his loot to a well-known US "city" bank. He is not joking. OMEN.

ATMs
NTT Data, Japan's largest system integrator, operates the nationwide on-line banking system and has been upgrading Japan's ATM network for the past dozen years. They say it's Y2K proof. OMEN. That's why the author is making sure he has JY200,000 in cash in hand on the big day.

Aircraft and airports
Japan's planes have to meet international safety standards. Still, the author intends to be well away from aircraft that could suddenly click from fly-by-wire to fly-by- the-seat-of -your-pants. Haneda and Narita have assured the government they will be compliant. OMEN. Let's hope they have on-site generators. Don't look up. Move away from Narita.

Elevators
Elevators are designed with earthquakes in mind. Should the computer fuse, you won't get a quick ride to the basement as they all have built-in breaks. Could actually be fun.

Hospitals
Don't drink yourself into a coma and get yourself put on life support as the Bug could pull the plug.

The airwaves
You may appreciate a blackout from Japanese TV's endless array of cheap game shows and petty pseudo documentaries. No company is compliant yet; 61 percent have projected June as their completion date, 18 percent September and the remaining 20 percent hope to be compliant before December 31. OMEN

Household utilities
Vacuum cleaners, rice cookers, danbo; some clocks may go, others won't. Your washer may not work, but your neighbor's will. Don't rely on your video's forward recording too much. OMEN

Phones
You can't put calls through on your keitai anyway. Why worry? OMEN

Water
Editor's and writer's tip: buy twenty bags of cat litter. Put it in your bath. Move apartments when the crisis is over.

The bottom line
Y2K will continue to produce mind-boggling stupidity, arrogance and scare mongering. But the US Senate reported last month that Japan was badly "behind" in countermeasures. The worst-case scenarios for Y2K include accounting for reactor meltdowns and global financial crisis. The US Senate may be a bunch of c(r)ooks, but people like Yardeni and Gotoh aren't. It's real. If actualized, the gargantuan scope and depth of the nightmare could be even worse than the most sordid of Hollywood scriptwriters' imaginations.

Will Japan let Fukui blow up and Tokyo descend into a chaotic blackout? Japan's crisis management capability has already been demonstrated in the Kobe earthquake. Me? I'm stocking up - in September-before prices rocket.

You have been warned.