In IT workplaces, the difference between people who are comfortable with computers and those who are not is easy to see.
No one needs to know everything from the beginning. But the habit of looking things up, trying, failing, fixing, and thinking through how a system works is built through repeated experience.
"By 2030, Japan will face a shortfall of up to 790,000 IT engineers." This projection, published by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, is no longer a concern limited to the technology sector. For anyone raising children today, it is a question about education and opportunity.
The engineers who will fill — or fail to fill — that gap are in classrooms and living rooms right now.
Engineers who work in recruitment and team development share a consistent observation: the difference between employees who grow rapidly in their early careers and those who do not often traces back to how much — and how freely — they used a computer as children. Before adolescence, they had accumulated years of self-directed experimentation that no school curriculum can replicate in a short time: building things, breaking things, starting over, following an idea wherever it leads.
The PC Gap Is an Income Gap
The data confirms this concern. Surveys show that households with annual incomes below two million yen have a home computer ownership rate of only 38.5%, compared with 92.7% in households earning ten to fifteen million yen. Smartphones are widespread across income groups, but creative digital activities — programming, video editing, writing and designing documents — require a computer. A smartphone is a consumption tool. A computer is a production tool. The distinction is not semantic; it determines what a child can actually build.
Households earning ¥10–15 million/year: PC ownership 92.7%
— A gap of over 54 percentage points that shapes which children can enter the digital economy.
This hardware gap extends into academic outcomes. Research shows that ninth-graders from households earning under two million yen score more than twenty percentage points lower on mathematics assessments than peers from households earning over fifteen million. In an era where digital fluency and academic performance are increasingly linked, this gap is not narrowing — it is likely to widen.
Why GIGA School Devices Are Not the Solution
The most common counterargument is that every student now has a school-issued tablet. Japan's GIGA School Initiative has provided one device per student across public primary and middle schools — a genuine achievement. But from an engineer's perspective, it does not close the underlying gap.
School-issued devices carry usage restrictions. Children cannot install custom programming environments, build personal projects from scratch, or follow a curiosity-driven idea at midnight when inspiration strikes. What produces IT engineers is not classroom instruction. It is unstructured time with a machine you can do anything with: running a Python script just to see what happens, failing at building a game and trying again, dismantling an HTML page and rebuilding it differently. These formative experiences happen at home, on the child's own time. They are available only to children who have a computer at home — and as the numbers show, that is still determined largely by how much their household earns.
An Invisible Gap Becomes a Structural Problem
When Japan reaches the 790,000-engineer shortfall in 2030, the people filling — or failing to fill — those roles will be today's children. If nothing changes, the pathway into a digital career will continue to depend heavily on the economic circumstances a child was born into. A digital divide left unaddressed becomes an inherited one: a structural problem that reproduces itself across generations.
At Digital Kodomo BASE, we provide refurbished computers free of charge to children who do not have one at home, and we maintain an open space in Ota Ward where any child can explore, build, and experiment freely after school. The soil in which engineers grow is not a classroom. It is a child with a machine, time, and the freedom to follow their curiosity wherever it leads. Every child deserves that environment — not only those born into households where it already exists.