International Friction and Cooperation in High-Technology Development and Trade Papers and Proceedings (1997) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Japan: The Philosophy of Government Support for Information Technology
Japan: The Philosophy of Government Support for Information Technology
Pages 267-277
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 267... ...
After all, we have been told that Japan is financially crippled and afflicted with backward technology and that it is shrinking in influence compared with the emerging markets of Asia. Jack Welch, the Chairman and CEO of General Electric, has cautioned American businessmen against "believing their own press clips." In 1994, Welch observed: I like to think of what we U.S.
|
From page 268... ...
Even during this nadir of financial performance, NTT recorded over a billion dollars of profit, and Hitachi, Toshiba, and Matsushita over $500 million.2 When an American information technology company is in dire straits, it loses a billion dollars, yet somehow the media convinced Americans that Japanese companies were in deep financial trouble even as they continued to record profits. Since then, financial performance, and more importantly, morale, among Japanese information technology companies has improved.
|
From page 269... ...
Japanese companies may advertise in the same American news media that vaunt the "borderless economy" inhabited by the "global corporation," but their leaders do not believe that the ownership of manufacturing capacity is irrelevant. The best put-down of these arguments that I have seen is a comment by the president of Honda Motors on hearing the news that the British car company Rover had been acquired by BMW.
|
From page 270... ...
In contrast, service industries are harder to export, typically employ fewer subcontractors, and inevitably involve the rendering of services by non-Japanese employees overseas. When 25.4 percent of the graduates of the elite University of Tokyo's Engineering Department entered the financial services industry in 1988, it was such a cause for alarm that the president of Fujitsu was called in by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI)
|
From page 271... ...
Even for those technologies developed entirely by Japanese government laboratories without private industry participation, and freely listed as being available for license (e.g., through the Japan Industrial Technology Association [Zaidan hojin Nihon sangyo gijutsu shinko kyokai]
|
From page 272... ...
The Japanese government, in my experience, reduces business risk by fostering discussion of technology trends, developing support for technologies in the Japanese press and in the Japanese legislature, promoting standardization, blunting foreign competition, and supplying seed funding. Not everything the Japanese government promotes leads to success: Japan has dumped billions of dollars in national funds into its software industry, to be sucked up by many of the larger Japanese computer firms.
|
From page 273... ...
Some nonprofit organizations in Japan, particularly foundations (zaidan hoping focus money from industry on research problems in such areas as telecommunications and optoelectronics. Occasionally, the activities of major foundations, such as the Key Technology Center, will be funded by government sources such as the Japan Development Bank and the dividends from NTT stock held by the Ministry of Finance.
|
From page 274... ...
company will supply equipment inside a special structure, one can make the construction costs of the structure exceed the cost of the equipment, call the resulting contract a contract for construction services instead of a contract for "goods," and argue that GATT codes do not apply. Or one can limit procurement of airport control software to companies with a "Class A Electncal Manufacturer' s License" in Japan, thereby cutting out every American company without a factory in Japan, and every Amencan software company by definition.
|
From page 275... ...
JAPAN: THE PHILOSOPHY OF GOVERNMENT SUPPORT TABLE 1 Who Is Really on Top U.S. Leading Technology Dependency on Japan Computers Semiconductors Printers Multimedia Cellular telephones Smart weapons Aviation Satellites Floppy disk drives CD-ROM drives Optical disk drives High-resolution displays Flat-panel displays OCR scanner engines High-performance batteries High-purity silicon steppers Dicing saws Ceramic packages Epoxy for plastic packages Copper foil for PCBs Laser diodes Laser printer engines Video conferencing cameras CD-ROM drives High-resolution displays Flat-panel displays Gallium arsenide High-performance batteries Ceramic packages Video cameras Flat-panel displays Micromotors Gyrocompasses Gyrocompasses Flat-panel displays Micromotors Composite materials Entertainment systems Sensors Communications module 275
|
From page 276... ...
Market mechanism Consumer spending Expends few resources on weakening economic opponents Allow "insider" status to foreign companies Who is "Us"? Military "throw weight" Consumers want democracy Reject societal hierarchy Attack authority Public disclosure A babble of views about Asia Save the turtles!
|
From page 277... ...
130. Class 100 clean room Recombinant DNA isolation laboratory Superconducting 24.7 tesla NMR device X-Ray CT scanner DNA sequencer Laser beam particle dispersion counter Amorphous material continuous testing apparatus Superconductivity critical point magnetic detector Solar cell testing device Optical fiber signal loss testing equipment 250 MHz IC logic tester <1 micron beam spot E-beam IC tester Tester for IC patterns of <20 microns Flat-panel display tester Optical data storage media tester Magneto-optical data storage media tester Semiconductor material purity thermal tester Optical recording media tester Laser beam mask pattern measuring equipment Computerized three-dimensional micromeasuring equipment Three-dimensional robot motion noncontact measuring device Outer space robot weightlessness simulator Machine tool electromagnetic noise measuring device Molecular structure analysis graphic workstation Multiuser, multitask software engineering workstation 2400 MFLOPS scientific supercomputer Carbon fiber filament process apparatus Rocket nozzle graphitized carbon processing apparatus <100 Hz ~ 260-GHz microwave network analyzer 23 gigabit per second fiber optic digital signal analyzer Spacecraft reentry heat shield production device Rocket engine spin test apparatus Rare earth recovery equipment Real-time computerized continuous-forming apparatus SOURCE: Stern, Technotax, Asian Technology Information Project, Tokyo.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.