Across town, a group of Japanese Internet pioneers were grinding their teeth in frustration. The company they had set up to provide commercial Internet services had been denied a license to operate by Japan's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. Holding up the locals while waving on the foreigners is not the way business is usually done in Japan. Something odd is going on.

That something, in essence, is the head-on collision of two cultures: The freewheeling, democratic style of the Internet has run smack into traditional Japan at its most authoritarian. On one side, you have the technology pioneers, young volunteers who built Japan's largest research network by their own efforts, without any support from the Japanese government. They are led by Jun Murai, the man some Americans (like Carl Malamud and Howard Rheingold) call the Internet samurai.

On the other, you have the officials charged with providing network services to the Japanese research community. They have tried to ram unpopular standards and technolo-gy down users' throats - and failed. Their leader is Hiroshi Inose, arguably Japan's most powerful technocrat.

The officials resent the pioneers' early successes and are waging a dirty-tricks campaign to try to regain the upper hand. Through their arrogant behavior, the pioneers have played into hands of their rivals, who are masters of the bureaucratic game.

Today, the situation has degenerated into a highly emotional conflict, with each side hurling accusations and insults at the other. Little TWICS has been caught in the crossfire. In mid November, the company's long-standing domestic e-mail connection via Tokyo University was suddenly cut off, apparently in retaliation for TWICS having opted to use a non-Japanese Internet link. Then the company received an intimidating phone call from a man claiming to represent the computer center at Tokyo University.

"Stop doing business in Japan!" the man shouted, "Shut down at once!" (TWICS has since been reconnected.) "It's one of the trickiest messes I've seen in years," comments Internet luminary David Farber, a University of Pennsylvania professor who tracks developments in Japan. It is also a mess that matters. For, as Farber points out, what the Japanese do affects the rest of us. And while Japan may be the world's second-largest economic power, the Japanese remain dangerously isolated. Networking has the power to change that by bringing Japan closer to the international community. But by the same token, failure to log on to the world's largest network could leave Japan more isolated than ever.

The massive proliferation of the Internet has left the Japanese far behind. As of June 1993, Japan had roughly five networks for every 100 in the United States. Outbound NSFNet traffic from Japan that month was 42,000 Mbytes, roughly the same as that from Taiwan, a country with one sixth Japan's population, and less than half that from Australia, the Pacific Rim's most aggressive network user.

Young Japanese have heard about the Internet and they are eager to get access to it. The irony is that the very people who should be encouraging them to log on are instead preventing them.