TOKYO: In the United States, the backlash to artificial intelligence seems to be scaling almost as fast as the technology itself. Japan offers a different case study.The country has been slow to adopt AI, but it’s unusually calm about it. From the outside, its late start is easy to dismiss as another sign of digital underperformance. It may instead prove a valuable opportunity to skip some of the messier, early phases of diffusion that have been marked by hype, risk and expensive experimentation.Japan can learn from the first movers and skip to the impactful part of turning the technology into real economic infrastructure. AI has the potential to be more practical than performative here; there’s less angst about displacing workers when the labour force is shrinking. Some of the nation’s constraints, from how to care for an ageing population to language barriers and software gaps, are exactly the kinds of problems AI can solve.Diffusion, meanwhile, is finally picking up. During the first quarter of this year, AI adoption in Japan increased 3.4 percentage points, more than three times faster than the global average, according to Microsoft’s AI Economy Institute first quarter report. Separate data from Tokyo-based telecom giant NTT Docomo found that usage nearly doubled between this February and last.