Growth of Japanese cellular development
At the end of World War II Japan's economy and much of its infrastructure was in ruins. While America's telecom research and development increased quickly after the War, the Japanese first had to rebuild their country. It is remarkable that they did so much in communications so quickly. Three things especially helped.
The first was privatizing radio in 1950. No commercial radio or television broadcasting existed before then and hence there was little demand for receivers and related consumer electronics. Stewart Brand, writing in The Media Lab, quotes Koji Kobayashi in his book Computers and Communications: "Clearly the release of radio waves was a pivotal event that set off a burst of activity that revitalized postwar Japan. In this sense it is quite significant that every year on the first day of June a grand 'Radio Waves Day' takes place to commemorate the promulgation of the Radio Waves Laws." The second great help was Japan re-gaining its independence in 1952, allowing the country to go forward on its own path, arranging its own future. The third event was an easy patent policy AT&T adopted toward the transistor.
Fearing anti-monopoly action by the U.S. States Justice department, the Bell System allowed anyone for $25,000 to use its transistor patents. Although the first transistorized products were American, the Japanese soon displayed an inventiveness toward producing electronics that by the mid-1960s caused many American manufacturers to go out of business. This productivity was in turn helped by a third cause: a government willingness to fund research and development in electronics. Essner, writing in a Japanese Technology Evaluation Center report, neatly sums up most of the telecom situation:
"In 1944, there were 1 million telephone subscribers in Japan. By the end of the war, that number had been reduced to 400,000. NTT [Nippon Telegraph and Telephone] was established to reconstruct the Japanese telecommunication facilities and to develop the required technology for domestic use and production. Between 1966 and 1980, NTT went through an age of growth, introducing new communication services, and the number of subscribers exceeded 10 million by 1968. From 1981 to 1990, NTT became a world class competitor, with many of its technologies, including its optical communication technologies, being used throughout the world. In 1985, NTT was converted into a private corporation." [JTEC]
NTT produced the first cellular systems for Japan, using all Japanese equipment. While their research benefited from studying the work of others, of course, the Japanese contributed important studies of their own. Y. Okumura's "Field Strength and its Variability in VHF and UHF Land Mobile Service," published in 1968, is cited by Roessner et. al. as "the basis for the design of several computer-modeling systems." These were "[D]eveloped to predict frequency propagation characteristics in urban areas where cellular systems were being implemented. These computer systems (the two main cellular players, Bell Labs and Motorola each developed its own) became indispensable to the design of commercial cellular systems."[SR3]
Often thought of as the 'Bell Labs of Japan,' NTT did not manufacture their own products, as did Western Electric for the Bell System. They worked closely instead with companies like Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. (external link) (also known as Panasonic in the United States), and NEC, originally incorporated as the Nippon Electric Company, but now known simply as NEC. (external link) As we've seen, Oki Electric was also a player, as were Hitachi and Toshiba. The silent partner in all of this was the Japanese government, especially the Ministry of International Trade and Research, which in the 1970s put hundreds of millions of dollars into electronic research. The Japanese government also helped their country by stifling competition from overseas, refusing entrance to many American and foreign built electronics.
The Ministry of International Trade and Research, otherwise known as MITI, controls the Agency of Industrial Science and Technology. That agency traces its roots to 1882, its Electric Laboratory to 1891. Many other labs were established over the following decades to foster technological research. In 1948, MITI Ministry folded all these labs into the presently named Agency of Industrial Science and Technology (external link). Funded projects in the 1970s included artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, and, most importantly to communications, research into very large scale integrated circuits. [Business Week3] The work leading up to VSLI production, in which tens of thousands of interconnected transistors were put on a single chip, greatly helped Japan to reduce component and part size. It was not just research, which all companies were doing, but also a fanatical quality control and efficiency that helped the Japanese surge ahead in electronics in the late early to mid 1980s, just as they were doing with car building.
On March 25, 1980, Richard Anderson, general manager for Hewlet Packard's Data Division, shocked American chip producers by saying that his company would henceforth buy most of its chips from Japan. After inspecting 300,000 standard memory chips, what we now call RAM, HP discovered the American chips had a failure rate six times greater than the worst Japanese manufacturer. American firms were not alone in needing to retool. Ericsson admits it took years for them to compete in producing mobile phones. In 1987 Panasonic took over an Ericsson plant in Kumla, Sweden, 120 miles east of Stockholm to produce a handset for the Nordic Mobile Telephone network. As Meurling and Jeans explained:
"Panasonic brought in altogether new standards of quality. They sent their inspection engineers over, who took out their little magnifying glasses and studied, say displays. And when they saw some dust, they asked that the unit should be dismantled and that dust-free elements should be used instead. Einar Dahlin, one of the original small development team in Lund, had to reach a specific agreement on how many specks of dust were permitted." [Meurling and Jeans]
America and the rest of the world responded and got better with time. Many Japanese manufacturers flourished while several companies producing cell phones at the start no longer do so. Other Japanese companies since entered the world wide market, where there now seems room for everyone. Many years ago Motorola started selling into the Japanese market, something unthinkable at the beginning of cellular. And the proprietary analog telephone system NTT first designed was so expensive to use that it attracted few customers until years later when competition was introduced and rates lowered. The few systems Japanese companies sold overseas, in the Middle East or or Australia, were replaced with other systems, usually GSM, after just a few years. But now I am getting ahead of myself.
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Resources
Blecher, Franklin H. "Advanced Mobile Phone Service." IEEE Transactions on Vehicle Communications, Vol. VT-29, No. 2, May, 1980
[Business Week2]"Fewer busy signals for mobile phones" Business Week, Industrial Edition, August 7, 1978 Number 2546: 60B
[Business Week3]"Japan's Bid to out-design the United States" Business Week, Industrial Edition, April 13, Number 2863: 123
Gibson, Stephen W., Cellular Mobile Radiotelephones. Englewood Cliff: Prentice Hall, (1987): 141, quoting information from the company Personal Communications Technology. You can view the table I cite from this book by clicking here for the low resolution version first (85K), and, if you are still interested, try your luck with the original TIFF image file, an astounding 2.2 megabytes!
This Bahrain date was confirmed on December 5, 2000 by Mr. Ali Abdulla Sahwan, Manager, Public Relations, of the Bahrain Telecommunications Company (Batelco) in a personal correspondence to myself, Tom Farley. There is contradictary if somewhat baffling evidence from the General Manager of C&W's radio division in Bahrain at the time, a Mr. Alec Sherman. He maintains that the system was not cellular but, well, read his own words and then tell me what you think.
[JTEC] Forrest, Stephen R. (ed.). JTEC Panel Report on Optoelectronics in Japan and the United States. Baltimore, MD: Japanese Technology Evaluation Center, Loyola College, February 1996. NTIS PB96-152202. 295 to 297
http://itri.loyola.edu/opto/ad_nonsl.htm (external link)
Meurling. John and Richard Jeans. The Ugly Duckling: Mobile phones from Ericsson -- putting people on speaking terms, Stockholm, Ericsson Radio Systems AB (1997) p.46 ISBN# 9163054523
[SRI3] David Roessner, Robert Carr, Irwin Feller, Michael McGeary, and Nils Newman, "The Role of NSF's Support of Engineering in Enabling Technological Innovation: Phase II Final report to the National Science Foundation. Arlington, VA: SRI International, 1998.
http://www.sri.com/policy/stp/techin2/chp4.html (external link, now dead)