In Taiwan for the Computex show, the government-backed Market Intelligence Center held a news conference that gave some moderately bad numbers for IT hardware production. Later, journalists discovered that the story was much worse: The MIC waited until just after Computex to announce May numbers that were way below April's figures.

As any traveler knows, a weak economy has a certain upside. Taxis are plentiful, bartenders happy for paying customers. But I couldn't quite relate to the Taiwan of 2001. My previous two dozen reporting trips to Taipei, stretching from 1983 to 2000, had nearly all revolved around Taiwan's booming economy.

Over those years, I often wondered why the capital city was so dumpy and dirty when the economy was so strong. Now, the dirt is less obvious but the economy is weak.

Just as South Korea's cash cow is the almighty DRAM, Taiwan's economic health is driven by the personal computer and the two big chip foundries. UMC and TSMC account for something like half of the capitalization of the Taiwan stock exchange, now at a 10-year low.

Moving north from Computex in Taipei to the VLSI Technology Symposium in Kyoto, Japan, provided relief from Taiwan's June heat but not from the gloomy mood. Kyoto was in the midst of its cool, rainy season. But before I got out of the sparkling Kansai airport came more bad news: A madman had run amok with a kitchen knife at an Osaka elementary school. And the Japanese economy was weakening. What will pull Asia back into economic growth? I would be tempted to say China except that it is a Communist-led economy. The joke going around Taipei is that China's economy is good because two engineers are at the helm, while Taipei's economy, led by a lawyer-president, is in the dumps.

Perhaps the anti-Bush riots in Gothenberg, Sweden, point to a future in which technology becomes more important. Concerns over global warming and energy waste may prompt higher investments in fuel cell and battery R&D for gas-saving hybrid vehicles. And companies may fully embrace distributed work forces, paying for broadband to home offices, videoconferencing and other energy-saving technologies.

Embedded systems can help save energy in the home; intelligent transport systems can make travel more efficient and broadband networks could support smarter work lives.

Kyoto, after all, is a city where people lived a cultured life long before the automobile arrived.