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Bob Johnstone

We Were Burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs And The Forging Of The Electronic Age Paperback – September 24, 1999

by Bob Johnstone (Author)

7 ratings

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Are the Japanese faceless clones who march in lockstep to the drums beaten by big business and the bureaucrats of MITI, Japan's miracle-working ministry of international trade and industry? Can Japanese workers, and by extrapolation their entire society, be characterized by deference to authority, devotion to group solidarity, and management by consensus? In We Were Burning, investigative journalist Bob Johnstone demolishes this misleading stereotype by introducing us to a new and very different kind of Japanese worker-a dynamic, iconoclastic, risk-taking entrepreneur.Johnstone has tracked down Japan's invisible entrepreneurs and persuaded them to tell their stories. He presents here a wealth of new material, including interviews with key players past and present, which lifts the veil that has hitherto obscured the entrepreneurial nature of Japanese companies like Canon, Casio, Seiko, Sharp, and Yamaha.Japanese entrepreneurs, working in the consumer electronics industry during the 1960s and 70s, took unheralded American inventions such as microchip cameras, liquid crystal displays, semiconductor lasers, and sound chips to create products that have become indispensable, including digital calculators and watches, synthesizers, camcorders, and compact disc players. Johnstone follows a dozen micro-electronic technologies from the U.S. labs where they originated to their eventual appearance in the form of Japanese products, shedding new light on the transnational nature of twentieth-century innovation, and on why technologies take root and flourish in some places and not in others.At this time of Asian financial crisis and the bursting of Japan's bubble economy, many are tempted to dismiss Japan's future as an economic power. We Were Burning serves as a timely warning that to write off Japan—and its invisible entrepreneurs—would be a big mistake.

Print length

448 pages
Language

English
Publication date

September 24, 1999
Dimensions

5 x 1.03 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0465091180
ISBN-13

978-0465091188
Lexile measure

1220L
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Bob Johnstone is a freelance journalist who has written about science and technology for fifteen years. He has served as Japan correspondent for New Scientist, technology correspondent for Far Eastern Economic Review, and has been a contributing editor and writer for Wired. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991 and was the recipient of an Abe Foundation Program grant.

Product details

Publisher : Basic Books; 1st Paperback Edition (September 24, 1999)
Language : English
Paperback : 448 pages
ISBN-10 : 0465091180
ISBN-13 : 978-0465091188
Lexile measure : 1220L
Item Weight : 15.9 ounces
Dimensions : 5 x 1.03 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,156,916 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #443 in Exports & Imports Economics
- #1,178 in Industrial Manufacturing
- #3,640 in History of Technology

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Lobsterfrosting

Good read...

Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2013

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This is a pretty good book about how the electronics industry has developed in Japan (mostly) and the rest of the world. I do not like the authors use of 'hole flow' which was unfortunately taught to me when I went to AT school in the navy. Hole flow is retarded if you know anything about the molecular level of electronics. Otherwise, this book is very good and interesting.

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Bicycle Enthusiast

Buy this book!

Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 1999

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An excellent look at several decades worth of innovation. One bonus is the fascinating portrayal of leading edge developments at major US labs who then fumbled the transfer to products. I can't say enough about how well-written it is and how unique the historical perspective is. Superb!

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R. Beise-Zee

Valuable stories but wait .. don't generalise yet

Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2003

Bob Johnstone accomplished the long awaited account of the enormous effort Japanese entrepreneurs have put in innovations in the electronics industry. Western economists have tended to overlook the personal contribution in the success of the Japanese electronics industry. After reading the book, it is just laughable that some in the West have accused the Japanese of stealing western technology. Johnstone provides the details of how painstaking the development of semiconductors was. Yet, the more detail, the less generalisations. Johnstone's stories are not representative, they are selective. It is not true that all technology was created in the US and all technology applied in Japan as Johnstone makes us believe. The book "only" proves that the success of Japanese firms was based on hard work. One of the problems of the book is, that the contribution of Europe are almost (with one exepction) totally omitted (there was considerable scientific progress in seminconductors, LCD, solar cells). This is problably to much to ask for, but it means that the book is incomplete. The second problem is, that the book does not really explain the dominance of Japan in several products lines. Entrepreneurship exists in the US as well, big companies that are unable to develop new industries exist in Japan as well. Johnstone is not convincing that there is a general difference between the US and Japan in entrepreneurship. Maybe he should have looked more into the domestic markets (military customers in US vs. consumers in Japan).

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Arturo DiGenero

Useful corrective, but...

Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 2007

Johnstone's account of the invention and development of several products on which much of modern technology is based is fascinating, and a useful corrective to myths about the lack of Japanese creativity in science and business.

However, Johnstone's focus on the engineers and businessmen has its own problems, foremost of which is that it gives the reader the impression that inspired geniuses are behind every invention, and leads him to neglect inventions which were developed at companies whose research was more systematic.

Johnstone is an entertaining writer, but sometimes rather hard to follow.

One person found this helpful

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J Gites

A great book

Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2000

Bookstores in the US are buldging with entertaining and informative "insider" books on Apple Computer, Microsoft, IBM, Xerox PARC etc. and a similar English-language writeup on Japanese companies such as Sharp, Sony, and Seiko is long overdue. Fortunately the Japanese stories and characters are every bit as entertaining and there are the bureaucratic villains as well. As a bonus, nice background information on the growth of the worldwide semiconductor industry is weaved into the narration. "Japan INC" seems a lot less monolithic after reading this book.
The author is married to a Japanese national and apparently devoted much of his adult life to researching this story.

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jannis53

Warum Japan den Elektronik-Markt erobern konnte

Reviewed in Germany on July 30, 2015

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Diese Buch sei so manchen Manager ans Herz gelegt. Es zeigt auf, dass es nicht Geld von MITI war, welche die enormen Fortschritte in Schlüssel-Technologien brachte. Es waren vielmehr unternehmerische Fähigkeiten wie Vision, Zähigkeit und Quer-Denken. Weiters denken erfolgreiche japanische Firmen längerfristig.

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