Seeking the seekers -
an interview with Bob Johnstone, author of We Were Burning

Bob Johnstone is the author of We Were Burning - a look at the individuals behind Japan's rise to dominate the world's electronics markets. His insightful analysis of the development of technology in Japan has appeared in Wired magazine, among others. Johnstone is currently a freelance writer based in Melbourne, where he is now working on his second book, on computers in schools.

Computing Japan's Daniel Scuka spoke with Bob in June during a research trip to Japan. The 47-year-old writer is an intelligent, soft-spoken individual who is clearly passionate about the people who have helped create Japan's postwar economic successes.

CJ: Against the model of the monolithic Japanese corporation, "We Were Burning" is very much a celebration of the individual engineer toiling in an unheated lab trying to come up with great new devices. What does this say about the "Japan Inc." image?

Bob Johnstone: It was part of my purpose to challenge the stereotype. The reason why I started working on the book was that I believed there was something going on in Japan that wasn't being reported ... that wasn't being seen, and that directly contradicted the stereotype. And that was that the contributions made by individuals were quite outstanding, and at the same time almost completely unrecognized. And that's sort of interesting. For Westerners it's hard to understand why - if you've done something really cool - that you wouldn't be celebrated, that you wouldn't be on the front page. But actually, in Japan, even now, these guys - these outstanding individuals - don't particularly want to be known in the wider world. They gain enough satisfaction from the acclamation of their fellows within the company, and they don't need that further [recognition]. I mean they're not looking for another job; or at least, in those days they weren't. So it was a case of looking at an obvious success story, and then following it back, and then finding out who was the guy who really made the difference; and in each case, there was somebody who popped out.

CJ: In the companies you examined, did you find any common characteristics among the people that you spoke with?

Johnstone: The most obvious one was motivation. These people were driven individuals, like Shuji Nakamura at Nichia Chemical, who was driven by his repeated failures; Toru Teshima at Stanley Electric who was driven by the fear that his company's core business would be overcome by a new technology. That's certainly one strong characteristic. I think it goes without saying that they were all workaholics (laughs). And there's also the age thing. It seems to me that the Japanese, and this brings me back to the stereotypes again, are very similar to their counterparts in the West. That's the way new technology happens. You need champions; you need guys who are prepared to put themselves on the line and work all night to prove a point, and who will stick their necks out. And you know ... this is a type that goes beyond Japan. I've often been interested the sympathy that you find between Silicon Valley engineers and their counterparts in Japan - they see each other as being kindred spirits - and again that goes against the story of companies and countries almost at war - certainly engaged in a trade war where they see each other as enemies. During the 80s this was very much the picture we had of Japan. And that didn't come through at all [in my research] as far as I can see. There is a tremendous respect in the West for the achievements of these people in Japan.

CJ: What does this say about the difference between "inventorship" and "entrepreneurship?"

Johnstone: They're two very different skills. In almost every case in the book, we're talking about inventions [that were made] in the US being exploited in Japan, and one of the things that intrigued me was, why weren't they exploited in their place of origin? And this goes to the heart of the process; that invention is serendipitous - you can't do it to order, and very often it happens in a context that is not conducive to taking [it] further.

CJ: If there was a eureka moment here in Japan sometime during the postwar period, what would it be?

Johnstone: The transistor is the big one - everything flows from the transistor. The timing of that invention is just amazing - or not so much of the invention, but the opening of the invention to the world. This happened at precisely the right moment to take advantage of Japan's recovery, and at the same time, at a time when [conditions] were probably uniquely favorable for startup companies to get going, because the existing structure had been so badly damaged.

CJ: What about the LCD display?

Johnstone: The LCD certainly was a biggy, and it continues to get bigger. I read recently that LCD revenues are about to overtake memory [revenues] - partly because memory [costs] have come way down - but it gives you an idea of the importance of the technology. But again, if you haven't got transistors, you haven't got active matrix displays - you need the transistor there before you get [that].

CJ: Sony plays a big role in your book?

Johnstone: Not so big (laughs)!

CJ: Sony is one of the best examples of the Japanese startup company - beginning in a back ally in Akihabara - that is now a global electronics company. But there doesn't seem to be a whole bunch of Japanese companies with them.

Johnstone: I agree with you that Sony is an exceptional company - and that one part of it has been international longer than any of the other [major Japanese companies]. In a recent Business Week, there was a story on the fifty Asian stars - people thought to be the most influential in the future. In that, one of the stars was the PlayStation guy and and he was quite critical of Sony - Ôit's a sclerotic bureaucratic [organization].' So I think you've got several factors involved here. One is that scale tends to work against the ability to move quickly - and Sony is very big now. Look at Hewlet-Packard - spinning off a whole chunk of its business while Sony is bringing its subsidiaries in-house. I'm not sure why they're doing that.

CJ: And Nichia?

Johnstone: The Nichia model is interesting - if indeed it is a model. It may just be a unique exception that proves the rule. So what you have there is one guy, and I've already mentioned his motivation - he was desperate to succeed, and he took a very high-risk route to get to where he wanted to be. He was backed up by his management, and, in particular, by the chairman of the company, to the tune of several million dollars - big money for a company that only had 500 employees. I think that's the kind of environment [in which] you'll find success. Having said that, how many such companies are there? How many such opportunities are there? In the case of Nichia, what you have is a chairman who was himself an entrepreneur - who built the company and understands the process of invention and commercialization and thus was prepared to essentially gamble on one of his guys. He'd done it earlier on, and actually not succeeded. So if one small company in Shikoku can come up with the goods - and this was amazing - we're talking about every light bulb in the world eventually; if one small company like Nichia can do it, then why not others? And one hopes that companies like Nichia are being celebrated in the Japanese media - I don't know if that is happening, but I certainly think it should be. But it's part of the culture [of invention] - you've got to celebrate the successes. And it was outside of Tokyo ... God knows, there are some interesting software companies up in Hokkaido.

CJ: How are these companies getting the word out? How are they announcing what they can do?

Johnstone: A lot of them don't need to get the word out. A lot of them are operating at a level that is not visible to the public. They're not producing commercial products, they're producing industrial products that never actually see the light of day. There's one company down in Kyushu that no one's ever heard of - in Kumamoto -called Hirata. Hirata makes production systems - they make the best production systems in the world. They make the production system [for] the Apple Mac. They made a lot of production systems for big companies - Matsushita used a lot of their stuff, [which] started out with conveyor belts, or rather, hand trolleys - these guys are the best production systems company in the world and no one knows of them, no one's heard of them. So you really have to seek'em out, and they're not obvious.

CJ: It takes a Sony to produce the Vaio series - slim, sexy, colorful, and aimed to make computers fun for the individual - and a Toshiba to perfect the laptop. Are US PC manufacturers losing the technology-to-market battle to their more nimble Japanese competitors?

Johnstone: I think the Vaio machines are a really interesting example of what could be the shape of things to come, from Sony at any rate. They represent the outcome of two worlds - AV and IT - colliding. The built-in CCD "motion eye" captures video images that can then be edited on the computer and transmitted over the Internet. GigaPocket provides further evidence of the same phenomenon. Sony knows all about video and, with the help of its computer science lab skunkworks, is learning fast about networks. My sense is that the rest of the crew have still got a lot of catching up to do, though.

CJ: Conversely, it appears that many technological events are passing the Japanese by. The PDA is a quintessentially suitable device order-made for the miniaturization skills of Japanese electronics manufacturers, but it's 3Com's PC-friendly Palm Pilot that easily dominates the global market today. What gives?

Johnstone: I think what's lacking here are well-established markets - nobody really knows what is going to be left standing when the smoke clears. Once things settle down a bit, I think you'll see the Japanese coming on strong. For example, everyone is raving about MP3 players, but the technology is still unstable so the market is for early adopters only. Sony is clearly poised to jump in here with a Memory-Stick-equipped Netman. At the same time, however, I think the nature of the game has fundamentally changed: products are not enabled by the availability of key devices; rather, [the trick] is in assembling combinations of useful functions and gluing them together with software.

CJ: What about the DRAM memory chip situation? The silicon divisions of NEC, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, Fujitsu, and Toshiba are bleeding bucket-fulls of red ink. Have the Japanese lost the ability to dominate a market?

Johnstone: Yeah, I was never particularly interested in computer chip markets, DRAMs always seemed to me like a commodity business driven by the conglomerates. I prefer to look at the smaller players and the clever things they do. Moore's Law has about ten years to go yet before silicon hits the wall, then watch the big guys try to innovate their way out of that one! Quantum devices anyone?

CJ: Japan's IT giants still have one leg firmly stuck in analog mode, while the world is going digital at the double. What do you foresee for Japan's electronic trailblazers in the coming millennium?

Johnstone: The story that I'm most interested in is, can Nichia continue to dominate the gallium nitride - blue and white LED - business into the millennium? Will they be the GE of the twenty-first century? Will others take heart from Nichia's extraordinary example? Will they rush to list on Japan's NASDAQ? Personally I could care less about yesterday's trailblazers: the start-ups are always more interesting, and my guess is we'll see far more of them - both entrepreneurial and intrepreneurial - in the coming years.

Back to the Table of Contents

Comments or suggestions?
Contact cjmaster@cjmag.co.jp