The Okamoto International Affairs Research Institute (OIARI) is constructing on behalf of the Virtual Foundation Japan a brand new multilingual communication service system for all small communities in the remote areas of the world.

With the cooperation and support of our Anglo-American technical associates, OIARI will be deploying a communication system, which enables a Japanese trading firm to use its own Internet home page to send e-mail to the isolated communities in the remote mountainous regions of the Philippines where there is no conventional communication infrastructures.

This system will enable the Japanese consumers to send their messages written in Japanese, and yet their friends in the Filipino village will receive them in English translation, and vise versa. The home page will also enable the Japanese (or any foreign) viewers to see the color video scenes of the people in action in these villages producing organic agricultural products. The languages used will first be limited to English, Japanese and Russian, but there is a plan to include Chinese in no distant future.

All these services are available only to the outside viewers, however, because the Filipino villages' ground station capacity will remain limited to the use of e-mail services. And, if they want to have the connectivity with the Internet for viewing home pages in the future, the Inmarsat phone service will become necessary. Such decision will be a matter of cost vs. return consideration.

The Virtual Foundation Japan Tokyo, Japan