AI skills
The 38.8% who never learned how
58.8% of people in Japan have now used generative AI, up from 26.7% a year earlier. Of those who have not, 38.8% say the reason is that they do not know how. That is the highest share of the four countries surveyed, and it is a training problem, not an attitude problem.
The 2026 White Paper on Information and Communications has one number that gets quoted and one that should be.
The quoted one is 58.8%. That is the share of people in Japan who say they have used a generative AI service at least once, in work or in daily life. A year earlier it was 26.7%, and the year before that 9.1%. It more than doubled in twelve months.
The one that should be quoted is 38.8%.
Who is in the other 41%
The survey asked the people who have never used generative AI why they do not use text generation tools. Two answers dominate. 42.4% said they do not need it in their life or work. 38.8% said they do not know how to use it.
The same questions went to the United States, Germany and China. On "I do not need it" Japan looks like everyone else. On "I do not know how" Japan is the highest of the four.
Read those two numbers together and the picture changes. A large part of Japan's remaining gap is not people who tried AI and rejected it. It is people who say nobody has shown them.
Why this matters for a company
Japan's usage rate still trails the other three countries. The US and Germany are both at 75.6%, China at 93.6%. Text generation alone puts Japan at 55.0%, the US at 65.4%, Germany at 66.0%, China at 88.3%.
The survey is of individuals, not companies, but those individuals work somewhere. If the national pattern holds inside your company, a meaningful share of the people who have not touched AI are not refusing it. They are waiting to be shown.
Handing out licences does not reach them. The pattern we see in Tokyo rollouts is that the licence goes out, the people who were already curious start using it, and the ones who did not know how stay where they were. Months later the rollout is judged on the whole company and looks like a failure.
What actually reaches them
The people who say "I do not know how" are telling you what would work. They need someone to sit with them, in their own job, with their own documents, and do the first three tasks together.
That is not a lecture on prompting. It is a half day per department, built around the tasks that department already does badly by hand, followed by a written internal rule so nobody has to guess what is allowed. The rule matters as much as the workshop. Our working assumption, which we check in every engagement, is that some of "I do not know how" is really "I do not know if I am allowed".
Longer training programmes can qualify for Japan's reskilling subsidy, which we covered in an earlier article on this site. A single half day does not meet its minimum hours on its own, so eligibility has to be checked against the programme you actually run.
The honest version
Usage will probably keep rising on its own. The people who say they do not know how are unlikely to move on their own, because the invitation has to come from their employer. If you want to know how many of them sit in one of your departments, that is the first thing we count, and it takes an afternoon.