Although Japanese universities have relied greatly on information technology to resolve numerous problems, their high expectations are undermined by the lags in implementing that technology. This edited volume argues that lags in IT implementation in Japanese education are created by contradictory and challenging responses of the social environment. If this dialectic can be visualized as having hands, the right would be avidly promoting IT, while the left hand is simultaneously blocking it. The result, of course, is an impasse. The issues central to this stalemate are significant because they point beyond IT implementation and schools, to a broader set of problem areas in Japanese society.