Doug Carlston - Software People. An Insider’s Look at the Personal Computer Software Industry

Although the games may have transcultural appeal, the business of creating and marketing them is very different in each country. In Japan, for example, the most popular magazines are also software publishers! The position of the programmer in the economic hierarchy and concepts such as software entrepreneurship are perceived very differently in Japan. Programmers, especially young ones, never became wealthy and famous the way they did in the United States, unless they were among the very few who decided to strike out on their own instead of working for one of the large companies—an action that meets with far less approval in Japan than it does in this country.

The personal computer software industry as we know it is still relatively new in Japan because it took a little longer for the Japanese hobbyists to turn into industrialists. The first microprocessor programmers weren’t the same people as the first microcomputer hobbyists, and neither group rushed out en masse to manufacture and distribute hardware and software, the way they did in the United States. Nevertheless, both software entrepreneurship and a very healthy microcomputer market have grown up in Japan.

Outside the brief but enormous impact of video games, Japanese-created software has not been successful in this country, except for the early games for the Apple we sold at Broderbund, and the game market in the United States has long since declined from its peak in the early 1980s. Indeed, Japan has become a growing market for American-originated microcomputer software—particularly games.

I have a theory about the continuing success of computer games in Japan—as opposed to the rapid decline in the game software market stateside. It has to do with the American taboo against adult participation in the same kind of games that children play, a taboo that doesn’t seem so present in Japan. I never fail to notice, for example, that the majority of the customers in Japanese arcades are not always children and teenagers, as they are here, but are often young and middle-aged businessmen, as well. I have also noticed that in Japan, commuter trains are filled with adults, many of whom are utterly absorbed in comic books that emerge from briefcases the way copies of the Wall Street Journal appear in American commuter trains. In the United States, no self-respecting accountant or account executive would ever read a comic book while commuting on the 8:15. Similarly, to Americans, playing games in public or even in the home is considered “immature” or “childish.” In Japan, for some reason, that attitude is not as prevalent.

My theory on the Japanese fascination with comic books and games doesn’t mean that I’m an expert on Japanese culture. Although I’m not a student of the cultural differences between our two countries, I do know something about differences and similarities between the American and Japanese microcomputer software industries. My acquaintance with the Japanese software world dates back to that coincidental meeting the first time Gary and I attended the West Coast Computer Faire. Eventually the agreement we made with Mioshi was superseded by a direct arrangement with Star Craft’s founder, Minoru Nakazawa. In time, our original contact with him not only contributed significantly to Broderbund’s early growth, but it also led to other connections and friendships in the Japanese software industry.

In fact, personal contacts, as I later discovered, are the only manner in which one can become involved in Japanese business in general and in the Japanese software business in particular. Japanese business, in short, is purely a person-to-person contact business, and a cold call seldom works there. One often goes through a series of strictly ritualistic meetings that end up producing nothing “tangible” in Western terms— the kind of trips that would be considered failures in our country. But the real intent behind all these meetings is for prospective business partners to establish some kind of personal relationship. As it turns out, the most important step in doing business with a Japanese company is when top management from both companies get to know and trust one another.

Of course, I didn’t know how this worked until after our business with Nakazawa led to business with other figures in the Japanese software world. And since he was our first contact in that world, it is only fitting that Nakazawa’s story should introduce the stories of other Japanese software people I have come to know.

The Nakazawas are a very old merchant family that has been doing business in the Tokyo area for hundreds of years. Our associate’s two brothers now run the family silk business, and it was Nakazawa’s experience in that business—particularly his attitude toward personnel policies—that eventually led to some problems he had in the software business.

In the silk industry, many small farmers bring their silk harvest to companies like the Nakazawas’. There the raw material is spun into silk, usually by young girls whom Nakazawa recruits from the poorer, rural northern area of Japan, where Japan’s indigenous people, the Ainu, live. These rural girls have difficulty finding good husbands in more prosperous areas of the country. Their marriage prospects are improved; however, by their working in the Nakazawa silk mill. Nakazawa recruits attractive twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls and brings them to his factory, which is near the silk farming areas around Tokyo, and where there are male farmers whose situation is handily complementary to that of these females. Very few marriagable young women who live near Tokyo want to marry farmers. The young farmers have a hard time finding wives. So the silk farmers gravitate toward the Nakazawa silk mill to court the silk spinners, who by the age of sixteen and seventeen are delighted to trade in their jobs for the role of farmers’ wives.

The young ladies’ families are happy, the girls and the farmers are pleased, and the Nakazawas are especially fond of the arrangement because their industry pays spinners on the basis of seniority. Since the company recruits the girls at twelve and since they usually leave by the end of their teens, the population of silk spinners rarely gains enough seniority to receive high wages. The perpetually youthful presence of a marriagable female population also brings more farmers (and their silk) to the vicinity of the Nakazawa factory, and the cycle repeats itself.

This has been a lucrative arrangement for the silk mill for hundreds of years. A similarly autocratic attitude toward his employees gave him trouble, however, when Nakazawa got into the software business. Programmers aren’t sons and daughters of poor farmers but rather upper-middle-class kids of the electronic generation. Programmers also tend to have very strong opinions of their own, a trait that always leads to conflict when anybody tries to impose any authoritarian structure on them.

After several years, our relationship with Nakazawa’s software company came to a sad end. This is unfortunate, since he is a loyal friend and an honorable and energetic businessman who has a nose and an eye for talent. Star Craft, founded in 1979, made its name on the strength of its programs—which meant that the company’s chief resource was the talent of its programmers. Among the young programmers of very high ability that Nakazawa found was Tony Suzuki, who wrote Alien Rain , a Brøderbund-licensed product that was the first entertainment product in the United States to knock VisiCalc off the number one position on the Softalk chart.

Nakazawa’s business acumen and ability to spot programming talent were, needless to say, extremely beneficial to us. We still remember him as one of the three people most responsible for our initial success. He might have brought his software to any one of a dozen bigger companies, but he stayed with us, and we won’t forget the time he worked with us through the night for a solid week, sleeping in shifts on our couch and helping us perform the monotonous labor of duplicating copies of his software for distribution.