When Entertainment Was Analog

    Consumer electronics was the most exotic and strategic beat at EE Times in the 1990’s, made all the more fascinating because it was covered by our most passionate and nontraditional reporter, Junko Yoshida.

It was exotic because its products were all about having fun and its center of gravity was in faraway Japan. The country leveraged the 1947 invention of the transistor and the semiconductor industry that quickly rose around it to pull itself from the wreckage of World War II. Along the way, it wrote the book on how to build small stuff in high volume with top quality, skills at the heart of chip making.

In the 1960s, it had its first hit products with some of the early transistor radios. They used thin chips to replace fat vacuum tubes, enabling AM/FM radios that, for the first time, you could slip into a shirt pocket. Pretty cool.

Japan Inc. was built on what followed – TVs, cameras, VCRs and the chips and other key components inside them. For example, it was a Japanese company, Funai Electric, that made the Magnavox TV my parents bought in the late 1960’s in Kalamazoo, Michigan, our first color set. The picture looked amazing and the price was just within the reach of a small family trying to claw its way into the lower rung of America’s then-expanding middle class.

Soon, companies like Hitachi, Matsushita (aka Panasonic), NEC, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba were on a tear. The products worked well and seemed fairly priced for a generation on its way up, so folks came to respect the brands. The engineers and managers who read EE Times wanted to understand these foreign rivals.

Japan grew to become the global leader in TVs, drawing import restrictions from the Carter administration in 1977. Within a few years, it also took a majority share of the market for DRAMs, memory chips essential to a wide range of products including every kind of computer from giant mainframes in banks and government back offices to the emerging desktop PCs.

By the mid-1980’s, Japan had risen like an electronics Godzilla, rivaling the largest semiconductor and systems companies in the US and Europe. Its success in DRAMs ignited a trade war.

 

Junko Takes on Japan

My mentor, David Lammers, covered Japan’s chip industry closely, especially the DRAM battles in that war. It was a big job for one guy, so he had an eye out for a second reporter to expand his one-man bureau in a tiny office in the Tokyo suburbs. He got more than he bargained for in Junko (below), a five-foot-zero bundle of ambition.

“I heard from a PR guy I knew in IBM Japan that Junko had applied for a job there, so, I asked her if she wanted to apply at EE Times,” Dave recalled. 

At the time, Junko was working in PR at Japan Victor Company (aka JVC), best known as the developer of VHS, the digital tape recorders that disrupted everything from how Hollywood’s features were distributed to how Mom & Dad made and showed their home movies.

Among her many duties at JVC, Junko was sometimes called on to serve tea for visiting dignitaries, a job steeped in the tradition that had women entering meeting rooms on their knees with trays of cups and hot water.  

Many Japanese women in the 1980’s tolerated the old traditions and restrictive policies of their male-dominated corporate culture; not Junko. She wanted – and deserved -- better.

“I had phone calls with her about topics like HDTV,” a hot emerging technology in the days of low resolution, analog TVs, “and I was impressed,” Dave said. “She had a lot of contacts in Europe, too, because she had gone there for conferences, and she and her boss were both Francophiles.”

David’s boss, Richard Wallace, the New York based editor-in-chief of EE Times and a mentor to most of its reporters, flew to Tokyo to meet Junko and formally welcome her to the newspaper.  He was impressed, too.

“Junko stood out as a star,” Richard said. “She was already a world traveler and close observer of high tech -- with amazing contacts.”

Once she got started, she “added depth and frequency” to EE Times’ Japan coverage, Richard added.

But the increased output came with friction in the closet-sized office. Junko and David, both strong personalities, butted heads on a regular basis. For Junko, David’s raconteur style of management with its storytelling and probing questions looked like just another man in her way.

“Junko really shined when she got out of Tokyo and traveled to other parts of Japan and then the US and Europe,” Richard added.

 

A Pied-a-Terre in Paris

As a reporter, Junko was a consummate insider.

Outside the cramped Tokyo office, she showed up as a bonne vivante, a petite fountain of laughs and hugs, fresh despite whatever long flight she had just endured. She and her Wisconsin-born husband, author David Benjamin aka Benj, kept a small attic apartment in Paris, a stone’s throw from Notre Dame, so she seemed to be perpetually en route to Tokyo, Paris, Silicon Valley, somewhere.

Once she landed and the happy salutations were over, Junko’s voice modulated to a CIA agent’s whisper as she recounted anecdotes she had picked up, pieces of whatever journalistic puzzle she was currently assembling. And she was always working on a big story, an exclusive.

When we met, her reports were often about MPEG, a newly minted compression standard for sending digital video. Her next story might be about a future version of the standard in the works, or someone with a patent on a key technique it required. These undisclosed works-in-progress might unlock a strategic door for the future of television, movies or whatever. The details were often arcane, sometimes even the implications were a bit cloudy, but it would be “a big deal, believe me,” she assured us. And it often was.

In the days when the standards for DVD and Blu-ray video disks were getting hammered out, Junko was our go-to source for all the many twists and turns of who was using what technology to which advantage and what it all might mean.

For a brief time, I was Junko’s boss. (Later she was mine, more on that in another chapter.) As editor-in-chief in pre-internet days, it was my job on Thursday nights to pick which stories would appear on Page 1 of the weekly newspaper the following Monday morning.

A few reporters just filed their stuff, perhaps with a short note for context, and let me do the picking. Sometimes I had to call a reporter to make sure I understood how significant their story was or wasn’t. Junko was the most vocal in advocating for her stories, especially if they might get overlooked or dismissed because they were about some esoteric topic or dealt with obscure details.

“The workplace culture at EE Times was very friendly,” Junko said in a recent phone call. “If I asked for an analyst’s name you shared your Rolodex freely -- that was true of Lieberman and Loring, just about everybody -- that was very helpful. We were courteous to each other -- but we all competed for the front-page slot,” she added with an arch laugh.

Indeed, as I noted earlier, I used to do a little celebration dance in my Hong Kong office when I got a fax of EE Times’ Page 1 and saw one of my stories landed in that coveted upper right-hand corner reserved for the hottest breaking news story of the week. 

Speaking of cherished nooks, Junko and Benj’s tiny Paris apartment said a lot about them. It was packed with music cassettes and CDs, a cramped kitchen stuffed with the ingredients for gourmet French and Japanese meals and an extra helping of beds—bunk beds in the small bedroom with a pocket view of Notre Dame (depicted, right, in one of Junko's watercolors) and two more beds built over the kitchen. They were people people, regularly entertaining guests. They generously lent their apartment out to traveling friends and even joked about an adopted “French daughter” who frequently stayed there.

But no portrait of Junko is complete without mention of her own pictures. In those rare moments when she was not trying to break a big story or presiding over a group dinner at a fine restaurant, Junko painted watercolors, typically Parisian street scenes (below). I’m no expert, but to my eye they were as skillful as anything from a full-time artist. 

The paintings, like Junko, were full of life. The dinners, however, sometimes had a darker side. Though inseparable for the last 40-plus years, at the drop of a hat Junko and Benj could fight like cats and dogs, even at group dinners in a fine restaurant, leaving those in attendance to look at the floor or each other awkwardly until the storm passed.

“You can imagine having them as house guests,” one former colleague said with a laugh.

I didn’t understand why this globetrotting duo could go at each other in such an unfiltered way in public until I read one of Benj’s latest books. “An Apartment in Paris” shares their long journey to becoming property owners in the French capital. Within its first 20 pages he recounts with great humor and insight what he calls “The Fight.”

Next: Godzilla vs. the PC