Words from Women on the Global Stage, Part 1: Chieko Asakawa, Chief Executive Director of Japan’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation

April 20, 2023

We spoke with Dr. Chieko Asakawa, the Chief Executive Director of Japan’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation—also known as Miraikan—and the first female Japanese IBM Fellow. She talked to us about the development background, at IBM, of her “Home Page Reader”, the world’s first practical text-to-speech system for web browsing, as well as the role of innovation brought about by diversity, and left us with a message for young women in STEM and other fields.

As advocates for invention and creativity, we notice that the word “invention” and inventions themselves are not always highly valued in Japan, but you make frequent use of the word “invention” in many of your presentations.

Definitely; I make a point of using the words “invention” and “research” in my speeches. In the U.S., even elementary schoolers use them, but they aren’t used very often in Japan, where they’re felt to be something distant and not personally relevant. I believe it’s important to spread the word about invention and research via STEAM education.

Speaking of the importance of STEM education, the theme for this year’s International Women’s Day was “Innovation and Technology for Gender Equality”. How do you feel about the current state of affairs, with a relatively low number of female inventors—women in STEM—worldwide?

It’s well known that bringing together people with diverse perspectives gives rise to innovation, and it’s also for that reason that I feel we need to increase the number of female inventors and women going into STEM fields in Japan. At Carnegie Mellon University, which I’m on the faculty of, we have focused on the low number of female students majoring in computer science. To solve this problem, we implemented a variety of measures to address, such as placing higher value on attributes—like leadership—that are not directly related to computer science but are important when it comes to performing research. As a result, we managed to reach an even split between male and female students.

When discussing how diversity creates innovation, I often quote Frans Johansson’s The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures, in which he explains that combining diverse perspectives gives rise to innovation, which is why diverse teams can come up with more new ideas. This is something I’ve experienced myself. Around the time when I developed Home Page Reader at IBM, some members of my research group were of the opinion that webpages are designed to be visual representations and can’t be made sense of aurally. There were many talented male researchers there, but they weren’t able to imagine the possibility of experiencing a webpage in the form of speech. Being blind, however, gave me the perspective of wanting to make it possible to comprehend webpages aurally, which led to finding a technique for converting webpages to synthesized speech, leading to the development of Home Page Reader. In this way, I believe, diverse perspectives can give rise to innovation.

In addition to my perspective as a blind person, I also have the perspective of being a woman, and I think that women can have their own ways of thinking about user interfaces, which has also contributed to innovation.

Alexander Graham Bell’s mother and wife were deaf, and Bell himself taught at a school for the deaf. It was experiences like those that drove his research on converting sound into electrical signals, which led to the invention of the telephone—a good example, I think, of innovation motivated by accessibility.

I recall being very surprised—and it made a strong impression on me as a Japanese person—when I heard that text-to-speech web browser development at IBM started in Japanese and only expanded to English and other languages after that. In recent years, however, it feels as though there has been less innovation originating in Japan.

It can perhaps be said that it’s a problem of Japan’s that it’s an environment that is not very amenable to innovation, and I think there are two reasons for that. One is that an appreciation of the value of diversity and diverse perspectives is not yet widespread, and the other is that Japan is an environment that makes it difficult to achieve social implementation, in which technology is deployed to solve societal problems.
During social implementation in the U.S., certain risks can be avoided by the use of agreements that make it clear that use of the technology is at one’s own risk, but in Japan, the provider of the technology is sometimes held liable despite the existence of an agreement along such lines.

I think that my 2019 induction into the American National Inventors Hall of Fame, in recognition of my work in developing IBM’s Home Page Reader, is related to diversity becoming increasingly widely valued in the U.S.

Although Japan comes in third, behind China and the U.S., in terms of number of PCT applications, there is concern about the fact that the average number of national-phase entries per PCT application originating in Japan is only 2.6 (countries), which is lower than many other countries. It seems like Japan is behind in terms of not only diversity, but also globalization.

In the U.S., although there are famous schools like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, people out there making an impact come from all over, not just universities like those. At Carnegie Mellon, there are lots of talented people from all over the world, resulting in a diversity of mindsets that has been stimulating for me. There aren’t very many Japanese students, though, with a majority coming from India and China. It may be due to the low proportion of Japanese people who study abroad, resulting in a shortage of globally minded talent in Japan, that Japan’s numbers are low when it comes to foreign patents obtained and journal articles with high impact factors.

With calls these days for more women to enter STEM fields, could we get some words for women in STEM?

It’s a fact that at present, there are more men in STEM fields, and the low proportion of women may sometimes weigh on your mind. But when it comes to innovation, there’s no need to be self-conscious about being female; rather, I think it’s best to take a positive view, looking at being a woman as being a strength, and follow your own path. Follow your own path, believing in your own unlimited potential, without being confined by boundaries such as which specific field you’ve chosen.