No idea what the rest of the company is like, but innovation is somewaht hard to come by in Japan, so it's reasonable to expect most companies to not really be pushing the envelope. Ironically, NTT contributing to a no-bullshit rock-solid open source tool like Postgres is par for the course -- it's great that they're pushing innovations inside Postgres, but technically from an outside lens it's a conservative place to invest.
Sure, if you look at how they design their websites, signup process and router UX, it's... a bit special (from a "western" perspective) ... But it works.
I mean, they brought customer installable java apps way earlier to the game, and it was miles ahead of the crap J2ME that stack of western phones. They brought imode when other countries where toying with wap. Then NFC based electronic payment years before anyone else, GPS apps etc.
I worked with one of their phone QA team for a while, and they were unsurprisingly pragmatic, very clever on the trade-offs and cared a lot more about what you had to say than if you came with a white shirt.
As much as NTT can be a very old and dusty company, NTT Docomo was at least for a very long time a very dynamic and forward thinking company.
Japan's web infrastructure is also where NTT, KDDI and Rakuten play in Japan. All of them are horrible companies, if anyone looks at how their services work and operate. The West can rest easy, Japan's online giants represent no threat to anyone.