JUNET
Japan's first academic computer network, started in 1984 as a UUCP link between three Tokyo universities.
Jun Murai, then a graduate student, connected Keio, the University of Tokyo and the Tokyo Institute of Technology over ordinary phone lines using UUCP. That brought email and netnews, and the network soon grew to hundreds of institutions and companies. It also had to solve a problem Western networks never faced: how to push Japanese text through systems that only trusted seven bits.
The answer was an encoding that switched between ASCII and Japanese characters using escape sequences. It spread as JUNET practice and was written down much later as ISO-2022-JP, which remained the standard encoding for Japanese email for decades. Murai went on to found the WIDE Project in 1988, which took Japan onto TCP/IP, and is often called the father of the Japanese internet.