Willis plays John McClane, a New York cop who’s invited to his estranged wife’s high-rise office Christmas party in Los Angeles. Also attending, though, is a collection of Euro-nasties led by the terrific Alan Rickman, who plays the suave yet psycho criminal mastermind to the hilt. Their attempt to shake down the Nakatomi Corp. for millions in bearer bonds quickly goes awry as McClane single-handedly derails the group’s well-laid plans and plays, as he says, “the fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench.” With the cops and feds outside consistently bungling things up, McClane must rely on all his street smarts and ingenuity to foil the bad guys’ plot and save his wife. Cool action sequences, glib banter and memorable characters combine to make “Die Hard” a uniquely entertaining experience.

The DVD version lacks commentary by cast or crew, but this isn’t such a severe omission — the film is straightforward enough, and there’s only so much they could say about a building getting blown to pieces. The making-of featurette provides some behind-the-scenes glimpses of the sort usually encountered on “Entertainment Tonight,” and includes Willis describing the indestructible McClane as “not some supercop. He’s just an ordinary guy.” Yeah, and Batman is just a rich dude with a taste for tight clothes. The disc’s real treat is its digitally mastered THX sound, which brings new life to all the machine guns, explosions and shattered glass. Pipe this sucker through your stereo, and you’re practically a member of the Nakatomi board.

As directed and written by brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski, “The Matrix” is a masterful blending of cockeyed Japanese anime angles and Hong Kong chop-socky, and a whole acid trip full of what-is-reality mind games. Sci-fi filmmakers will be imitating its distinctive style and layers of intricacy for years to come.

Which is why the DVD version comes as such a profound disappointment. With so much back story and plot nuance to explore, not to mention the execution of all those shoot’em-ups, it’s nothing less than astonishing that neither Wachowski provides commentary on the goings-on. Without their input, the genesis of virtually the entire film remains a matter of second-guessing and interpretation. Nor does Reeves offer his perspective on the picture, which would arguably be the single best use of his one-note acting skills. Instead, viewers of the DVD must be content with the scattered musings of Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity in the film), visual-effects supervisor John Gaeta and editor Zach Staenberg. With Moss silent for all but her own scenes, the commentary focuses almost exclusively on technical rather than conceptual matters, and will try the patience of all but the most rabid film buffs.

The DVD also offers a “Follow the White Rabbit” feature, allowing viewers to check out behind-the-scenes footage of the major sequences by clicking a rabbit icon. But this can’t be done simultaneously with the commentary, which means you have to view the movie repeatedly to enjoy the entire package. Better to stick with the perfectly adequate making-of documentary that accompanies the disk, originally produced as a promo for HBO. Parts 2 and 3 of a “Matrix” trilogy will soon begin shooting back to back in Australia. As the story grows even more complex, let’s hope a Wachowski or two will lend their views to future DVD installments.

“Also,” I continue, “there isn’t much penetration in the workplace because mid-level managers still don’t understand the technology.” The Yomiuri guy isn’t sure about “penetration.” He turns to the interpreter, who provides a lengthy explanation of the concept. The Yomiuri guy nods and adds this to his notes. (I’m glad the interpreter is along. Even though I used to live here, I can honestly say that my language skills aren’t up to a cogent definition of “penetration.”) “Therefore,” I sagely conclude, “it will take quite some time before Japan catches up with the West in Internet usage.”

The Yomiuri guy writes this down. In a matter of days, I know, my trite perspective will be shared with 10 million readers of Japan’s largest daily newspaper, and it no doubt will be cast along the lines of: “Japan losing ground on Internet, U.S. expert warns.” My little contribution to bilateral relations.

So what do I think about the Internet in Japan? As a five-week visit draws to a close, and after numerous meetings with local tech and business people, I think I can safely say that the Japanese don’t have much of a clue about the Net. Nothing personal. I just don’t think they get it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. I’m a racist, insensitive, culturally imperialistic, Japan-bashing son of a bitch. Now that we’ve gotten the usual response to “foreigner in Japan says something critical about the country” out of the way, let’s move on.

Internet use in Japan is growing, and it will keep growing, make no mistake. There are approximately 15 million Internet users in the country, according to most private-sector estimates (the government optimistically places this figure closer to 17 million). In a nation of more than 125 million people, it’s not much of a stretch to predict that use of the Net will double or triple over the next few years.

But does this mean that the Japanese “get” the Net? No. In fact, you could say that the country’s all-powerful bureaucrats and corporate overlords have gone out of their way to prevent online networks from taking root.

Chatting with members of the local tech community, I’ve heard all sorts of horror stories about the reams of regulations for how domain names are parceled out and how a handful of backbone providers fleece Internet service providers. Japan’s telecom industry may be in the midst of deregulation, but that hasn’t stopped authorities from tangling the Net in mounds of red tape, or from maintaining onerous per-minute access charges.

Meanwhile, e-commerce in Japan is virtually nonexistent, with most Japanese wary of online security in general and use of credit cards in particular. To get around these obstacles, Softbank, Yahoo Japan and other partners have come up with “Japanese-style” e-commerce whereby a consumer shops for and orders goods online, and then picks up and pays for them in cash at the local 7-Eleven convenience store. Miraculously, the Japanese government claims that e-commerce involving individual consumers totaled about $1.4 billion in the last fiscal year. I have yet to meet a single person here who’s ever bought anything online.

And yet, the Japanese media features stories about the Net almost every day, and just as in other parts of the world, ads for even the dopiest products sport the requisite URL. In practice, however, the Net is treated as little more than an exotic plaything, not much different from a box of Furbys — which arrived here a few weeks ago; unlike much of the Net, they speak Japanese.

The other day, Sharp, the electronics maker, unveiled an $800 microwave oven capable of downloading more than 400 recipes from the company’s Web site. Users would pick a dish, and then the oven would tell you what ingredients are needed and how they should be prepared, and then it would automatically cook the dish just so as per its online instructions. Local newspapers hailed this as an important innovation in the field of Internet technology.

“When a flag is raised in this country, everyone wants to jump on board because it’s a fad,” says Pete Perkins, director of a Tokyo ISP called the Asia Network. “That’s the way it is right now for the Internet in Japan. It’s a fad.”

I would argue that part of the reason for this is that Internet use here isn’t geek-driven, as it was in the United States during early adoption. By that I mean Japan doesn’t really have techno-nerds as we understand the breed in the West. Instead, the country has “otaku,” which translates roughly as “obsessives,” with a decidedly negative connotation. Generally speaking, otaku are viewed by other Japanese as having an unhealthy passion for some very narrow interest — animated films, say, or cars, or schoolgirls in sailor suits.

Or the Internet.

“The otaku guys are the ones with fetishes about women’s panties and things like that,” offers Richard Lindsay, general manager of the system division at interQ, a local online service. “These are the guys who sit alone in their little apartments, and go onto the Net because they want to see adult pictures.”

A geek-driven Internet culture is constantly exploring new opportunities and applications. An otaku-driven culture is concerned almost exclusively with self-gratification. It’s an important difference, and goes quite a ways toward explaining the relative lack of Net-related technical developments and entrepreneurship from this side of the Pacific — not to overlook the almost complete absence of venture capital, of course. It also helps explain the decided lack of gloriously goofy sites for a Japanese-speaking Web surfer to visit, thus making the online experience less adventuresome, and less compelling, than elsewhere.

So if Japan’s bureaucrats see the Net as simply another industry in need of rigorous oversight, and if the corporate world sees it as hardly more than an add-on appliance feature, and if many of the early adopters see the Web as the world’s greatest circle jerk, what does everybody else make of this technology?

Not much, I’d say. Among high school and college kids — who make up the majority of Net users here — the killer app isn’t e-mail, or even Web surfing. It’s chat. People generally log on late at night when costs are cheaper to see if anyone they know is online, and if so, to shoot the breeze for a little while. Not that they couldn’t accomplish this just as easily, and probably for less money, with the ubiquitous mobile phones that no trendy Japanese teen would be without. But, hey, it’s fun to go online every now and then.

Most chat groups in Japan aren’t the text-based gab-fests we think of in the West. Rather, they’re VRML-powered virtual environments where one’s cartoon-like avatar can rub shoulders with those of others. “People tend to just clink into someone else and say hi, and then go on and see what the wall looks like around the next corner,” says Asia Network’s Perkins, who at least gives high marks to the Japanese designers who create these snappy online worlds. “Nobody makes better-looking walls,” he notes.

In a society where everyone reads comic books, the Net thus enables anyone to be a manga character. It’s like a dream come true.

Along related lines, I’m starting to wonder if Japan’s emphasis on group dynamics is conducive to widespread use of a technology that’s scientifically designed to empower the individual. Aside from the country’s financial and technological barriers to Internet use, might the cultural element be the biggest obstacle of all?

For me, this helps explain Japan’s unflinching love of paper, and why e-mail is nowhere close to replacing faxes as the primary form of official communication. Visit almost any company or government office here, and the first thing you’re struck by is the stacks of paper. Everywhere you look — big, precarious, yellowing stacks of paper. A pack rat’s paradise.

While part of the blame goes to an instinctive reluctance to throw things out — that would be disrespectful — there’s a deeper force at work. In a society where consensus is prized above all other things, paper is frequently used as the medium for cementing the group to a given purpose.

Many Japanese have what’s called a “hanko.” This is a small, lipstick-size cylinder, usually made of ivory, embossed with one’s personal seal. This seal is registered with the government, and it carries the same legal weight as does a signature in the West. When a key decision is called for, it is written on a piece of paper and passed around to all related members of the organization. Each recipient affixes his hanko, and thus signs off on the idea. The group has spoken.

“Paper is a way of enforcing the structure,” says Chris Bryden, chief technical advisor at Sunnynet, an Okinawa ISP. “When you put your mark on paper, you make a commitment and indicate your place in the hierarchy.” (You’ll notice that I give plenty of credence to the views of non-Japanese techies. I find that they tend to speak more freely than their native-born colleagues, who tend to adhere to the official line in interviews and are uncomfortable speculating as to why things are the way they are. So sue me.)

While some Japanese companies are introducing groupware applications, the vast majority remain married to the hanko system. And as long as this is how decisions are made, online networks will remain little more than office message boards — if that. Most companies still rely on PA systems for office-wide announcements, and play little snippets of music at different times of the day to remind workers when they should eat their lunches or return to their desks.

Handing pieces of paper to one another offers brief moments of human interaction. This is how “wa,” or group harmony, is promoted. E-mail may be infinitely more efficient and a good deal less wasteful, but it doesn’t do much for one’s sense of wa.

A couple of days after my encounter with the Yomiuri reporter, I find myself at the offices of mighty Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, where I’ve been asked to meet with some of the people handling the company’s online activities. It doesn’t take long for one of the NTT guys to lean close and ask, “What is your opinion of the Internet situation in Japan?”

I do my usual riff about high prices and mid-level managers, and the NTT guy nods his head in agreement. He translates my answer for the others in the room, and then asks if I have any questions for NTT.

Turns out I do. I note that the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Japan’s leading business daily, has quoted anonymous sources as saying that the government plans to “urge” NTT to introduce flat-rate pricing for Net access within the next couple of years. The plan reportedly would entail Net users shelling out 5,000 yen, or about $42, to NTT each month on top of the approximately 3,000 yen, or $25, paid to one’s ISP.

“That would mean,” I point out, “that unlimited Net access would cost users 8,000 yen, which is more than three times what people pay in the U.S.”

A brief discussion breaks out in Japanese. Finally, one of the NTT guys says, “You must understand that we are trying to bring down prices as much as we can.” Another chimes in: “Right now, the average Internet user pays between 9,000 and 10,000 yen a month. So 8,000 is an improvement.”

Like I say, they just don’t get it.

And, in the most notorious such case to date, three businessmen belonging to
related firms checked into a hotel in a Tokyo suburb last year, shared a final
drink together, and hanged themselves in separate rooms. Some say there have
been dozens of other such suicides in recent months, and that the Japanese
press is deliberately downplaying the incidents so as not to encourage
imitators.

Japan is now approaching almost a full decade of recession, and, by most
accounts, the end is nowhere in sight. The strange thing, however, is that
this doesn’t look anything like an economy in flames. People are still
shopping for brand-festooned clothing and accessories (Gap cargo pants: $70).
They’re still dining out on small portions in absurdly overpriced restaurants.
They still line up to pay about $15 for a ticket to see Robert De Niro blow
things up in “Ronin,” which just opened here.

The Japanese government has worked so hard to create a soft landing for its
plunging economy, it has succeeded in erasing virtually all sense of crisis or
urgency. The foundation may be crumbling, but, from the outside, Japan’s
economic house appears as neat and tidy as ever.

This is no small accomplishment. While neighboring South Korea has been to
hell and back over the past couple of years restructuring its once-bankrupt
economy and restoring a semblance of global competitiveness, Japan has managed
to dither along with a series of short-term fixes that only scratch the
surface of its deeper problems. If putting off the really hard work has been
Japan’s economic policy goal, then it can be said the country has succeeded
brilliantly.

“The government has made it possible for companies to avoid restructuring and
for many people to stay in their jobs,” said Brian Rose, senior economist at
Warburg Dillon Read (Japan). “There has been no dramatic crisis, and this has
allowed the country to keep muddling along.”

Of course, such a situation can’t continue indefinitely. “It may not feel like
a recession,” Rose observed, “but things are worse now than they were a year
ago, and we think they’ll get worse still. Japan has yet to hit bottom.”

The Japanese government sees things differently. Although the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development is projecting that Japan’s economy will
shrink 0.9 percent this year, Tokyo has forecast slight growth in coming
months. Moreover, Eisuke Sakakibara, Japan’s influential vice minister of
finance for international affairs, has predicted “robust recovery” by next
year, paced by rapid corporate restructuring, “albeit in a Japanese way.”

“It’s almost like they’re willing the economy to grow,” Rose responded. “Their
forecasts are wildly optimistic.”

I can’t speak to the validity of the numbers, but I can offer the perspective
of someone who lived in Tokyo for seven years, from the height of the fat-rich
“bubble economy” in the late 1980s to the first inklings that things had gone
terribly wrong in the mid-1990s. Japan has changed, and not for the
better.

In turn, the Japanese, never a particularly cheerful people, now seem
downright miserable.

There are a variety of factors at work here: rising crime in a nation that
takes justifiable pride in its relative lawfulness; the emergence of a younger
generation perhaps more interested in self-satisfaction than in contributing to the greater welfare of society; plummeting land prices; the once-unthinkable
collapse of established corporate institutions like Yamaichi Securities; a
stagnant political system; and living conditions so severe for some as to merit
scrutiny by Amnesty International.

But what has finally shaken the Japanese out of their state-sanctioned complacency more than anything else is the widespread realization that the nation’s much-cherished system of “lifetime employment” was actually a fiction.

Japan’s unemployment rate remained at a record 4.8 percent in April. This
number will almost surely increase as bloated companies continue struggling to
reduce payrolls, and as more and more college students spill into a labor
market that has no places for them. A recent survey by the Bank of Japan found
that no fewer than 80 percent of the country’s wage earners are concerned
about losing their jobs, and that nearly half have consequently cut back on
personal spending.

Over coffee, a man I’ll call Hiro Takahashi, a 39-year-old employee of an
electronics company you’ve heard of, said the head of his section was recently
transferred to a distant subsidiary — the Japanese version of corporate
exile — and that he’s pretty sure others in his department will be let go.

“I don’t have enough seniority,” Takahashi lamented. “If there are cutbacks,
then I might lose my job.” He isn’t sure what would happen after that.
“Luckily,” he said, “I’m not married. I will manage to survive. But there are
others who have wives and families. What happens to them when their jobs
disappear?”

What indeed. The government seems to be at a loss for how to deal with the
social cost of widespread restructuring, and has done little more to date than
establish the usual task forces and study groups delegated to look into the
problem. As part of recent propaganda efforts, the state-affiliated Japan
Productivity Center for Socioeconomic Development reported that about 2.6
million new jobs could be created if companies simply stopped existing
employees from working overtime.

Takahashi laughed at such a suggestion. “Working overtime is part of the system,” he said. “We consider it part of our regular salary.”

The simple, unpleasant fact is that Japan’s leaders lack the stomach for the
sort of wholesale changes that painfully restored a pulse rate to South
Korea’s economy, which grew by 4.6 percent in the first quarter. “Any
restructuring implies a redistribution of wealth,” noted Andrew Shipley,
senior economist at Schroders Japan. “Japanese society isn’t ready to condone
such changes.”

He pointed out that the country’s rapidly aging population — within 20
years, it’s predicted, fully a quarter of all Japanese will be senior citizens — means tax revenues will decline, despite continued governmental spending to
prop up ailing companies and institutions.

“Ultimately, Japan runs out of money,” Shipley warned. “The Japanese system in
place right now is not generating sufficient wealth to keep the structure
intact. Japan is basically in a deflationary spiral, which has been held in
check by the government spending lots of money. As soon as the government
stops spending, things will get a lot worse.”

Not everyone, however, takes such a dire view of the country’s prospects.
Takashi Imai, head of the powerful Japan Federation of Economic Organizations,
a leading business association, believes that “the economy has passed its
worst stage,” and that “bright signs” are already visible on the economic
horizon. (Apparently those bright signs don’t include a 4.8 percent drop in
April retail sales at the country’s largest stores, according to the Ministry
of International Trade and Industry, or a third straight month of declines in
average household spending, as tallied by the Management and Coordination
Agency.)

Richard Jerram, chief economist at ING Baring Securities (Japan), is one of
the few foreign observers to hold a moderately bullish opinion of Japan’s
economic outlook. “Japan is well past bottom,” he insisted. On top of that,
Jerram believes the government has acted prudently in not taking a Korea-style
blowtorch to its corporate hierarchy.

“You don’t want an aggressive restructuring of your economy when you’re in a
deep recession,” he said. “It’s unnecessarily destructive. Some people say
Japan must destroy so it can rebuild, but this is staggeringly bad economics.”

Jerram gives high marks to Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi — the man once
described as having all the charm of cold pizza — for having made more
strides toward addressing problems in the financial sector in the last nine months than previous administrations made in nine years. With Obuchi’s
standing in public-opinion polls holding steady, it seems a safe bet that
he’ll be reelected to a second term in office when Japan’s political power
brokers convene either late this summer or in the fall.

In other words, expect the country to stick to its current course of go-slow
recovery efforts and half-hearted restructuring. “It just doesn’t seem like
Japan is going to keep up with the rest of the world, and especially with the
rest of Asia,” said Warburg’s Rose.

Interestingly, Japan’s youngest citizens already seem to have an instinctive
grasp that the nation they’ll inherit will be vastly different from the one
their parents knew. A recent study by Dai-Ichi Mutual Life Insurance found
that students in kindergartens and primary schools nationwide have paid
attention to the grumbling of their fathers about uncertainties at the office,
and that few are looking ahead to a life of white-collar servitude.

Instead, a majority of Japanese children seem to be anticipating a country
that has tumbled from its economic pedestal, almost returning to its feudal,
agrarian roots. What occupation are kids here most looking forward to? Not
businessman. Not doctor. Not even baseball or soccer player.

They want to be carpenters.