Obituaries for Chalmers Johnson

The obituaries now have come out for Chalmers Johnson, the noted Japan scholar (and my onetime mentor) who died Saturday.

The best dead tree obit was in the Los Angeles Times by Dennis McLellan — the only obit indexed by Google News that addressed the breadth and depth of his influence, capturing all three phases of his career: China, Japan, and the “empire trilogy.” (The NYT fixated on the latter and ignored the work that created Chal’s reputation in the first place). Two other good obits were on the SF Chronicle website by Zennie Abraham (a student of Chal’s at the Berkeley poli sci dept in 1985) and the Seattle Business website by Leslie Helm, the Japan correspondent of the LA Times from 1990-1993.

More personal tributes came from Steve Clemons (his JPRI co-founder), and fellow “revisionists” Clyde Prestowitz and Jim Fallows. The coda to these tributes comes from Arthur Salm, a San Diego writer who got to know Chal in his final years.

An appreciation: Chalmers Johnson, 1931-2010

I received an email tonight announcing the death of my former mentor, Chalmers Johnson. According to his wife Sheila, he died this afternoon after several months of care from the local hospice.

Chal was larger than life, an unforgettable character who made an impression on most people he met. He could alternately be serious or playful, inviting or argumentative. Most importantly, he is the reason I became a college professor.

After obtaining his PhD from Berkeley in 1961, Chal taught in the political science department from 1962-1988 and was department chairman during some of its most influential years. He was lured to UCSD in 1988 by the promise of a new Asian Studies school called IR/PS, but then retired as part of the Voluntary Early Retirement Incentive Program, a UC-wide budget-cutting measure intended to get expensive senior faculty off the payroll.

Chal continued to teach part-time after his 1992 retirement, but soon had a falling out with the dominant IR/PS faculty faction and fully retired in the spring of 1994. As an open university student, I was there for his final IR/PS class along with a loyal cadre of Japan-focused master’s students.

I actually met Chal during his two semesters as a visiting professor at Cal State San Marcos (1993-1994). My mom saw in the paper that this famous guy was teaching a night class course on China/Japan/Korea at CSUSM — only 15 freeway miles from my work and home. For most of two semesters, I was the only student at his office hours as I made a point of visiting him whenever I could.

At a time when our Mac software business was slowly dying off — along with Apple Computer — Chal offered a window onto another career possibility: the life of a college professor. I decided to major in business — not poli sci or computer sci, two other options I considered — but it’s safe to say I wouldn’t have become a professor without his influence during this period. (This first required enrolling in grad school, because — as Sheila reminded me — “a Ph.D. is the union card of academia.”)

When I met Chal, it was during the early years of the Clinton Administration, when the elevation of Laura Tyson to head of the Council of Economic Advisors (briefly) gave Chal hope that his trade policy proscriptions might be become US policy.

Chal was the academic heavyweight among the Japan revisionists (or “gang of four”) — that also included three other book authors: Clyde Prestowitz, Karel van Wolferen and James Fallows. Chal’s contribution was the once-famous MITI and the Japanese Miracle. Although I read all their books, I never followed the other three as closely as Chal. But to summarize his points at the time:

• Japan is different from the US, an economic powerhouse, and needs to be studied on its own terms
• assumptions that it follows Anglo-American norms are foolishly naïve if not a form of egocentric nationalism
• Japan’s postwar economic boom was due to a form of managed trade
• if the US wanted to correct its trade deficit with Japan, it would have to match Japan’s jobs- and firm-oriented neomercantalism rather than its consumer-oriented open markets

As he predicted at the time, Korea and China saw that Japan’s policies enabled exports to the US market while protecting domestic firms from meaningful competition, and so (successfully) followed Japan’s playbook.

I played a small role in helping him set up the Japan Policy Research Institute, a virtual thinktank that Chal founded that was originally run by Chal and Sheila out of their San Diego-area home. (JPRI working paper #7 marked the first “publication” of my new career.) I also helped him switch to a Mac, and was his tech support person for many years until I moved away from San Diego.

Over the years, we drifted apart — almost entirely my fault. After my daughter was born, I had less time to spend hanging out with adult friends. But more than that, we drifted apart philosophically after “W” was elected, as Chal spent his final years raging not at America’s enemies or rivals, but at a US foreign policy that he repeatedly attacked as a form of imperial overreach.

Meanwhile, after I arrived at SJSU in 2002 and found several colleagues with far better Japanese language skills than I had, I turned my attention to (in a Ricardian sense) where I had both relative and absolute competitive advantage among the SJSU faculty: studying the technology strategies of Silicon Valley IT firms.

While he had been in declining health for many years, his death is a painful reminder to me that everyone’s time on this earth is finite, and that anyone may pass on without prior notice. It’s also nudge to take a more active role in maintaining friendships, beyond an occasional email and the annual family Christmas letter.

Photo credit: Chalmers Johnson, from a 2007 interview with UCSD TV.

Update Nov. 21: Dates of UC service updated per feedback from former IR/PS student Dr. Jason Dedrick.
Update Nov. 24: I’ve posted links to the best obituaries by reporters and Chal’s friends.

Scruitable Japanese

Looking for something else, I found an interesting website: What Japan Thinks.

The blog, written under the pseudonym “Seron,” is devoted to translating Japanese-language opinion survey results into English. For example, Friday’s post summarizes the effectiveness of contextual online ads in news sites and blogs, based on a survey of 1,085 Japanese respondents in March.

It is written by Ken Yasumoto-Nicolson, a mobile phone software engineer from Scotland who lives in Kansai (the region near Osaka). The author chose to write the blog after getting frustrated by how many people spouted off online based on stereotypes and assumptions, not facts.

The blog tags aren’t very useful, but there is a built-in (Google-based) search option. For example, on March 5 he summarized a panel survey of web surfers:

Q1: Is a computer or mobile phone the main way you view web sites? (Sample size=1,067)
Mobile phone 8.7%
Computer 84.0%
Both about the same 7.3%

An earlier 2005 survey produced very different results, but the sampling frame was people who already used their Internet-enabled mobile phones. As he notes, the March 2009 results may be skewed by the panel solicitation:

Note that one way that they recruit their mobile monitors is by getting them to enter their mobile phone email address when they apply to be a PC monitor, so bear that in mind while reading the results.

Other posts this year include on UMPC vs. Netbooks and portable music players/headphones.

As someone who likes free research data — for my research papers and for my blog — this is a great deal, even if the coverage (due to the availability of input product) is irregular.

Intel wants to own mobile phones, too

This morning I saw an interesting tidbit about Sharp developing an Intel-based cell phone for the Japanese market, to be sold by operator Japan Willcom. With 4.6 million subscribers, Japan’s 4th largest mobile carrier has less than 10% of the share of market leader DoCoMo.

The D4 phone uses Intel’s Atom CPU of the Centrino family, and will run Windows Vista (and for some reason, not XP). It has a 1024x600 screen and a 40gb hard disk. UMPC Portal describes the keyboard as “quite useable in a Psion-5 kind of way.” As such, it fits into the UMPC/MID category rather than a true cell phone, and in fact Willcom doesn’t expect to sell more than 100,000 a year.

Will this be a beachhead for Intel’s diversification into dominating (and displacing ARM) as a mobile phone platform? Intel’s prior diversification efforts have had their share of missteps. Intel’s previous attempts at the low power chips Xscale were spun off to Marvel, while its vertical integration into circuit boards also failed to displace the Taiwanese makers.

Frankly, I think Linux (not Windows Vista) is the growth opportunity Intel in the mobile space, as with its Mobile Internet Devices and its (Nokia-derived) Moblin technology. With web browsers, e-mail and IM clients available for Linux-based tablets, about the only thing an ultraportable Vista has going for it is native support for Microsoft Office documents. And if OOXML is really a standard, then that will eventually be available on Linux too.

Embedded OS technonationalism

When I was beginning my doctoral studies in the mid-1990s,
the U.S. was still worrying about global competition between technological rivals like Japan and Europe. Among a certain crowd, everything was about economic competition within the “Triad,” Ken’ichi Omae’s term for the US, Japan and Europe. (Obviously before the rise of Korea’s per capita GDP and China’s trade surpluses).

A few American scholars even talked about “technonationalism,” normally in the context of Japanese industrial policy that was aimed at the US (and that we should emulate). (I was briefly part of this crowd, and published my first few papers in 1994-96 quoting some of this work, but never made any significant contributions.) This was both fueled by and fueled the Clinton Administration’s foreign policy doctrine that war was obsolete and economic competition was the wave of the future.

One of the biggest pre-Clinton proponents of such arguments was Laura Tyson, whose treatise Who’s Bashing Whom? earned her a ticket from Berkeley to chair President Clinton’s Council of Economics Advisors. After the White House gig, Tyson went back to Berkeley’s Haas School as dean and then moved on to become dean at London Business School before returning to Berkeley. (There’s no record of her covering any Sting songs or even Blondie songs after either the CEA or dean gigs). Meanwhile, the economist passed over for the White House job has become a bitter New York Times columnnist who no longer does serious research.

All of this being a long forward to an odd article from the SJ Mercury that I read Tuesday morning on the plane (out to Philadelphia) about Japanese industrial policy for automotive embedded operating systems. The Japanese government kicked in $8.4 million [check yen] to help fund a consortium of 10 Japanese firms to develop said OS. It includes the big three auto makers (Toyota, Nissan, Honda) and major electronics suppliers like Denso (which as Nippondenso began life as was a Toyota division) and Toshiba. The story of the Japan Automotive Software Platform (JasPar) was also written up Sunday in Yomiuri (one of the big Japanese dailies) and PC World.

The money is coming from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, née Ministry of International Trade and Industry, the famed tsûsanshô of Japan’s postwar economic miracle. Spending $8m on embedded car software seems like a far cry from MITI’s glory days.

In fact, Chalmers Johnson’s book on MITI and the Japanese Miracle was required reading for budding technonationalists (or for anyone else in comparitive political economy) in the early 1990s. Listening to Chal’s night school class in 1993-1994 (and the associated office hours) had more influence on my becoming an academic than anyone else.

The MITI of the 1950s and 1960s used trade restrictions to build up Japan’s infant industries. Mark Mason studied how MITi delayed the TI integrated circuit patent in Japan long enough for Japanese firms to develop their own semiconductor capabitilies without having to pay royalties. Marie Anchordoguy (the inspirtiaton for my earliest Japan research) did her Ph.D. thesis at Berkeley (before it became Haas) on how MITI built up Fujitsu and other Japanese mainframe makers, using liberal financing in the domestic market to enable Japanese firms to undercut the prices of the the superior IBM computers.

It’s not just the Japanese, since nowadays the French view of industrial policy (dirigisme) has become the norm at the EU: after one success in a perfect storm of market timing and technology opportunity (GSM), the EC has spent almost two decades in a futile attempt to recreate that storm. (Tuesday’s report implied the Europeans also have their own automobile software consortium but I couldn’t find it, only their trade association.) Presumably the Koreans and Chinese will follow with their own national consortia, and then the US Big 2½ automakers will scream to Washington that they need their own subsidies.

But I can’t figure out what the deal is with embedded operating systems — it seems such small potatoes. The Mercury newspaper article parroted the Japanese press release “A standardized OS across the industry could have some big economic benefits, making it easier to bring new automotive technology into multiple models and bring down costs.”

Standardization has such benefits, but that doesn’t mean the Japanese carmakers have to go build their own. They could standardize tomorrow on an off-the-shelf solution from Wind River or MontaVista and get the same benefits — unless of course “bring down costs” is a code phrase for “stop paying foreign royalties.”

Don’t want royalties? Embedded Linux (or BSD if you dislike compusory sharing) is already available off the shelf for any firm. Why is the government involved? Is it that METI has to put up seed money to get Japanese firms to share and work together?

As industrial policy goes, it’s much less interesting than something major like TD-SCDMA. I suppose government industrial policy for an embedded OS is like the old line about the talking dog — what’s interesting is that he talks, not what he says.

Instead of responding with more technonationalism, perhaps MontaVista (or even Wind River) could put together an international open source coalition based on open source technologies. Given the popularity of open source in Scandanavia, they might able to peel off Saab and Volvo, which (this week at least) remain American-owned. If they did, the Chinese firms could choose to leverage the GPL technology while free-riding off the toothless enforcement of compulsory sharing in China.

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