1948–1959: Government research institutions and universities take the lead

The development of the first transistors and computers in the United States in the latter 1940s aroused great research interest in Japan after only a very short time lag. Makoto Kikuchi (1983), for example, recounts the excitement in some of the laboratories of MITI's Electrotechnical Laboratory that greeted the first public announcements in the United States of the invention of the transistor. Around 1950 in the United States ‘there was already a mountain of information accumulating about transistors… On countless occasions, the center director [in the Electrotechnical Laboratory], Sakuji Komagata, would get together with my boss, Dr George Michio Hatoyama, with Dr Kubo from the University of Tokyo and researchers from NEC, Toshiba and other companies, to “decode” this material’ (p. 27).

The rapidity with which transistor and computer technologies were acquired from the United States and Europe and reproduced in Japan was largely a function of the substantial capabilities that had been built up in the country since the 1920s in government research institutions, universities and private companies. These capabilities were developed as part of the process of constructing key infrastructural industries such as electricity generation and transmission and telecommunications. Significant government assistance was given to these industries from the time of their establishment and even higher priority was accorded to them during the militarization of the 1930s, the war years, and the immediate postwar period of reconstruction.