杏吧原创

Divided Sun: MITI and the Breakdown of Japanese High-Tech Industrial
Policy 1975-1993 by Scott Callon, Stanford University Press,
拢25/$29.50, ISBN 0 8047 2505 5

THE Japanese blitzkrieg on Western markets was in full swing in the early
1980s. Motorbikes and cameras had been swamped by cheap Japanese exports; now
markets for cars and consumer electronics were under siege. The next wave was an
assault on the real heart of high technology: microchips and computers. How had
the Japanese managed to achieve this phenomenal success?

Western analysts casting around for an answer fell gratefully upon a book by
Chalmers Johnson, an American political scientist. In MITI and the Japanese
Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy 1925-1975 (Stanford University
Press, 1982], Johnson asserted that: 鈥淐ollaboration between the state and big
business has long been acknowledged as the defining characteristic of the
Japanese economic system.鈥�

So that was their little game, eh? Collaboration. The idea that
responsibility for Japan鈥檚 success could be pinned on elite bureaucrats at the
Ministry of International Trade and Industry in cahoots with their peers at
large corporations soon caught on, an amalgam commonly referred to as 鈥淛apan
滨苍肠鈥�.

Editors thousands of miles away were quick to scent conspiracy. One of my
first assignments for New 杏吧原创 was to interview a manager at a
Japanese machine tool company about some recent breakthrough his company had
made. The editor instructed me to ask him whether, in achieving this
breakthrough, the company had only been following MITI鈥檚 instructions. The
manager鈥檚 reply was a sharp denial. And managers at other Japanese companies
responded to this question in similarly indignant fashion.

The main vehicle for this 鈥渃ollaboration鈥� between government and industry was
the research and development consortium. The most famous example was the VLSI
consortium, which aimed to produce microchips with more than 10 000 logic gates
on each one. This ran from 1976 to 1980, the period when Japan first made
inroads into Western markets for integrated circuits, in particular computer
memory chips. Many analysts concluded that this was not a coincidence.

Then came the Fifth Generation consortium, announced with great fanfare by
MITI in 1980. While previous consortia had been aimed at catching up with the
West, the raison d鈥櫭猼re of the Fifth Generation project was to
catapult Japan into the lead.

Panicked by the prospect, governments in the US and Europe rushed to respond.
The Americans formed the Microelectronics and Computer Consortium, the
Europeans sponsored ESPRIT, and the British鈥攄espite the Thatcher
government鈥檚 well-known aversion to interventionism鈥攃ame up with the Alvey
programme.

Of course, the Fifth Generation (which ground to a halt in 1992) completely
failed to achieve any of its objectives. Since VLSI, no other Japanese R&D
consortium has produced significant results.

The funny thing is that, despite this lack of success, Western governments
continue to follow blindly what they perceive to be the Japanese mode of
cooperative research. The Clinton administration, for example, is even now
pumping $600 million into the US Display Consortium, a research
organisation whose corporate members include AT&T and Xerox. In Britain, the
Labour Party鈥檚 science policy document is predicated on a similarly rosy view of
MITI鈥檚 success.

Scott Callon鈥檚 book offers a timely corrective to Johnson and his many
disciples. Callon is a political scientist from Stanford who now works as a
strategist at Bankers Trust in Tokyo. What he has done in Divided Sun
is to re-examine in detail four of the MITI research consortia, including VLSI
and Fifth Generation, plus two lesser-known ones, Supercomputer and TRON.

Callon has done his research with exemplary thoroughness. He draws
extensively on Japanese-language documents, including contemporary newspaper
reports and government papers. But what makes Callon鈥檚 evaluation particularly
worthwhile is that it is also based on interviews with 98 Japanese researchers,
managers and bureaucrats who were involved in all aspects of the consortia.

From this wealth of inside information, Callon concludes that 鈥渋t is
companies, not government bureaucracies, that have been at the heart of Japan鈥檚
stunning postwar ascent to international competitiveness鈥�. And that, far from
colluding, 鈥渃ompanies and bureaucracies struggled over government policy [while]
the public face of placid cooperation was diligently maintained, obscuring an
underlying reality of harsh internal and external competition. It is this fierce
and winnowing competition, not cooperation, that is the central dynamic in
Japan鈥檚 modern industrial society and, indeed, in much of Japanese society.鈥�

As Callon makes abundantly clear, the firms that participated in MITI鈥檚
schemes were usually extremely reluctant bedfellows. For example, to force firms
to work together in the VLSI project, MITI dreamt up the idea of a joint
lab.

Callon describes the reaction: 鈥淭he companies were horrified. Perhaps
`horrified鈥� as it stands does not quite capture the intensity of their feelings.
They were HORRIFIED, in big capital letters, full of shock and dismay. They
thought this was one of the worst bureaucratic nightmares ever to emerge from
MITI. The last thing, the last thing, they wanted to do was to send
their people to a joint lab.鈥�

In the Supercomputer consortium, things were just as bad, if not worse. To
integrate the components of this machine, engineers from NEC and Hitachi had to
travel to a factory belonging to their arch rival, Fujitsu. There, for fear that
they might overhear Fujitsu secrets, they were forbidden to ride in the
company鈥檚 shuttle bus or to eat in its cafeteria. They were not even allowed to
see the main computer they were working on鈥攖hey had to ask Fujitsu
employees to test their subcomponents, then come back and tell them what
had happened.

Needless to say, the supercomputer that resulted from this effort was a
miserable failure. By contrast, and despite the lack of cooperation, the VLSI
consortium was successful in its goals of cushioning companies against the
opening of the Japanese chip market to imports, catching up with IBM, and
promoting microchip technology as a core element in a strategic industry.

But the reason the VLSI consortium was successful, as Callon points out, had
nothing to do with joint R&D. Rather, it was the fact that 85 per cent of
the funding for the project went to finance the companies鈥� own private R&D.
The firms were able to apply these government subsidies directly to the
development of the competitive technologies that they needed to succeed in the
marketplace. Most of the 15 per cent spent on joint research went to a
technology that turned out to be the wrong bet鈥攅lectron-beam lithography.

Ironically, the very success of VLSI was in a sense the undoing of MITI鈥檚
ability to carry out industrial policy thereafter. Once they were able to stand
on their own two feet, the companies had little need of further government
subsidies. At the same time, Japan鈥檚 huge trade surpluses made it hard for MITI
to pursue what Western governments now saw as unfair practices.

Above all, it became clear during the 1980s that succeeding with leapfrog
efforts such as the Fifth Generation was much more difficult than with catch-up
efforts such as VLSI. 鈥淲hat had been the right strategy during the catch-up era
now became precisely the wrong strategy. Whereas concentrated funding of a
single technology area was highly effective during catch-up, since the money was
being spent on existing, proven technologies, these same concentrated bets would
prove to be highly dysfunctional as part of a futuristic R&D
strategy entailing basic research. Diversification, not concentration, was the
appropriate strategy.鈥�

The evidence, concludes Callon, 鈥渦nderscores the limits of industrial policy.
In MITI鈥檚 1980鈥檚 failures, there are dire warnings for would-be industrial
policy-makers everywhere.鈥�

It is to be hoped that they will take his warnings seriously. But Callon鈥檚
excellent, well-written and often amusing book will also be read and鈥攎ost
unusually, for a book by an academic, enjoyed鈥攂y anyone interested in the
history of semiconductors, computers and, especially, Japan.