Browse any of the dozens of websites on the Irish diaspora and one place you won't see any mention of is Japan. Well off the beaten immigration track, the formidable cultural and language barriers have scared off all but the most hardy pioneers.

But with more than 1,000 permanent residents, the Irish presence in the world's second largest economy is growing and today's trailblazers are very much children of the Celtic Tiger. Nestling among the Republic's traditional exports of missionaries and teachers are a crop of bright young people, all in their 20s and 30s, nurturing the high-tech nuggets of tomorrow's economy.

For better or worse, "the older crowd are being replaced by younger, IT-savvy Irish," says Mr Declan Collins of Tokyo's Enterprise Ireland Centre.

These ex-pats are the most visible sign of the Republic's expanding trade with the Asian superpower, which bought £2.4 billion (€3 billion) of Irish goods last year, a nine-fold increase since 1990. According to Mr Collins, the balance of trade between the two countries "has shifted in Ireland's favour for the first time".

The enterprise centre has already helped some 17 Irish companies set up in Japan, including XIAM information routers and computer security company Baltimore Technologies, along with more established outfits like Waterford Wedgwood and Bank of Ireland Asset Management. A new incubation centre in Tokyo, opened by the Tanaiste, Ms Harney, on her recent trip to Japan, is also helping small Irish companies break into the difficult Japanese market. Mr Collins expects the centre to host eight, mostly high-tech companies, by the end of the year.

But hasn't the Japanese economy gone down the tubes, buried under a mountain of red ink in the financial sector and left standing by the recent European and US high-tech boom? Not so, according to Tokyo based Irish author Mr Eamonn Fingleton, who argues that rumours of the death of the Japanese miracle are greatly exaggerated.

Mr Fingleton expounded these views in his best-selling 1995 book Blindside: Why Japan is Still on Track to Over- take the US by the Year 2000. While the tsunami of Japanese capital that swept over the rest of the world in the 1980s has receded, he says, "political and industrial leaders have consistently misrepresented the depth of the crisis".

In fact, he argues, Japan's problems have been tightly contained within the financial sector and, if you look carefully at the key economic figures, particularly manufacturing output and trade balances, "Japan's economy has been going from strength-to-strength and it suits Japan's leaders just fine for the world to think otherwise."

The fundamental health of the economy is reflected in rising living standards. "With the exception of a tiny minority of bankrupt speculators, most Japanese citizens enjoy considerably higher living standards than a decade ago,"

Mr Fingleton says. "Their life expectancy, already the longest in the world, is one year longer than a decade ago." While his views are not shared by everyone, there is no doubt that Japan's powerful IT manufacturing sector continues to hold attractions for some of the brightest foreign talent. Many of the newer Irish start-ups see enormous potential, particularly in the booming mobile phone business.

"We feel that the Japanese mobile market is at least 1.5 years ahead of the market in Europe and the United States and we can be useful to corporate clients here," XIAM's Japan manager, Mr Lee Fitzgerald, told Japan Inc. magazine this month.

XIAM, which recently went into partnership with Japanese systems integrator Net-ItWorks, has developed information router technology that allows users to access and solve server problems via mobile devices, something "that hasn't been available in Japan before", according to Mr Fitzgerald.

Mr Thomas O'Dowd, chief executive and founder of Nooper.com, also hopes to ride the mobile phone boom into Europe. The TCD computer graduate, one of 700 exFAS trainees who have touched down in Japan since 1984, worked for Mitsubishi Chemicals and Goldman Sachs before setting up Nooper last year. It was, he acknowledges, "a risky move", but he wanted to hop on the booming mobile bandwagon.

The six-person company, which operates entirely over the Internet, offers mobile services and helps other firms build and test applications for the I-mode series. O'Dowd and his team are also working on what he says is a key technology to enable mobile phone users to access the Internet more easily.

"The advantage of being in Japan is that we are close to the ground when new technologies are released. There is huge interest in Japanese mobile phone technology outside the country." The problems of finding finance in what is still a closed market for foreign companies, however, is mentioned by many of the startups.

Mr O'Dowd says that he found it "difficult to even open a bank account at first" and has financed his business without borrowing.

Nichiai Computers, another Tokyo-based Irish startup, has taken the same approach. "We've never borrowed a penny," says manager Mr Declan Bourke.

Nichiai was set up in 1994 by Mr Bourke, his brother Mr John Bourke and Mr Andrew Gilbert, who came over with FAS and ended up at NEC Corp. Their original idea was to import computer parts into Japan and assemble PCs in the overpriced market, but they found they lacked capital to compete with the computer giants that were just beginning to gear up.

The company changed tack and now offers computer and Internet consulting, servicing and design to mainly foreign clients in Tokyo. Despite the recession they doubled sales last year and Mr Bourke says they plan to move their team of 12 to bigger offices in central Tokyo. "We're at the critical mass stage because we're swamped with business," he says.

The clean bill of health from Irish start-ups seems at odds with the supposedly perilous state of the economy, but Mr Paul Timmons, another FAS success, who set up Eire Systems with Mr Matthew Connolly in 1996, suggests you have to look at the size of the Japanese market. "Japan is a massive economy. The part we're in is half the size of Leinster with an economy hundreds of times its size. I hear about Japan being in dire straits but when I look out my window all I see is buildings going up."

Eire Systems, which provides IT consulting and project management services to mainly foreign-based financial companies, employs 25 people and, according to Mr Connolly, "the recession hasn't affected us".

Dublin-based Parthus Technologies and Network 365, which have also recently set up in Tokyo, obviously agree.

"Despite the problems here, Japan isn't going away," says Mr Fingleton.