Japan Touting HDTV Despite International Static

Several men watch in silent rapture as quick, blubbery sumo wrestlers gyrate and shove each other across a panoramic video display, an image that startles the eye with sparkling clarity.

This visual feast is billed as tomorrow’s television. But a casual visitor to the headquarters of NHK, Japan’s quasi-governmental broadcast company, can follow a cavernous basement hallway to a small, darkened theater and gaze at it today.

Each afternoon, NHK uses a satellite to broadcast an experimental hour of what it hopes will be the world’s standard in high-definition television, or HDTV, by the end of the century. By doubling the number of horizontal scanning lines and widening the screen, the new television format takes a quantum leap in picture quality--seducing, stimulating and drawing the viewer into the action.

The world has its antennae up, but static is clouding the Japanese vision of future TV. The upshot is that the typical American may be denied HDTV for many years after it becomes commonplace in Japan. And it will not be possible to blame the delay on technical difficulty.

NHK’s mission to promote its HDTV format, which the nonprofit broadcaster began researching shortly after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, has met with suspicion and hostility abroad. Detractors see it as a technological Trojan horse, concealing the mercantilistic interests of Japanese electronics manufacturers bent on dominating yet another commercial market and, ultimately, depriving foreign countries of their strategic industrial base.

“Japan has been branded an ‘economic animal,’ but there’s no truth to that charge in the case of HDTV,” protested Takashi Fujio, director of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.’s HDTV development center and formerly the head of NHK’s research program. “We did not conceive this for the benefit of Japan alone, but rather as something that would draw together the world.”

Fujio’s dream is of a universal TV medium that would transcend national borders and standardize global communications, rectifying the schism left when the present generation of color television broadcasting materialized in three major incompatible systems. But what he sees now is a nightmare of “techno-nationalism.”

To block inroads into their markets by NHK and the consortium of Japanese companies involved in developing its high-definition technology, opponents in the United States and Europe have proposed competing, and incompatible, broadcast standards. The Europeans have aggressively challenged the Japanese lead with a research consortium already producing prototypes. The Americans are mainly talking, but the talk occasionally gets ambitious.

Although U.S. high-definition technology remains essentially in the conceptual stage, a bipartisan proposal in Congress would jump-start U.S. research in an urgent effort to catch up with the Japanese, using as much as $100 million in government funding as well as providing tax breaks and relaxing antitrust regulations to encourage joint research.

The U.S. Defense Department has stepped in, sponsoring American R&D; in high-definition television to the tune of $30 million. National security is a concern not only because the new video has applications in weapon systems, but because an increasing number of officials believe that U.S. companies must remain on the cutting edge of commercial technology to support a viable defense industry.

HDTV is especially critical because it is expected to spark a huge demand for advanced computer chips and become a “technology driver” that would reshape the semiconductor industry, some analysts say.

Visiting Tokyo earlier this month, Commerce Secretary Robert A. Mosbacher signaled that the Bush Administration is backing away from the kind of active support for HDTV research and development that Mosbacher advocated as his “highest priority” when he took office earlier this year. The secretary has reportedly been under Administration pressure to tone down his endorsement of anything smacking of government industrial policy, in keeping with the tenets of laissez faire economics.

Competitive Friction

Instead, Mosbacher called for a “two-way street” on HDTV, although he would not elaborate on what the Americans might have to trade for Japan’s sophisticated know-how.

In a symbolic development, however, Texas Instruments on Sept. 11 became the first American company to reach a technology transfer agreement with NHK, allowing the Japanese subsidiary of the American chip maker to obtain basic patents for the design of semiconductors used in decoding devices for HDTV receivers.

Yet competitive friction over HDTV remains in high-resolution focus, underscoring Japanese strengths--and American weaknesses--in technological application and commercialization. While Americans continue squabbling over standards and industrial policy, Japan’s home viewers can expect to have access to the new state-of-the-art television within two to five years.

Large-screen home receivers may remain exorbitantly expensive, however. There are serious doubts about how long it will take for manufacturers to achieve the economies of scale necessary to bring down the cost of the sets to an affordable level, especially without a common standard in overseas markets.

A Sony HDTV monitor now sells for about $5,700--without the decoding device needed to pick up satellite broadcasts. Another company, NEC, has the price to beat for a decoder: $7,100. Officials at the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, which has administrative authority over NHK, had hoped to see the price of a combined monitor and decoder decline to about $3,500 within five years, but now concede that that may be overly optimistic.

Likewise, the ministry’s initial forecast that as many as 45% of Japanese homes would have HDTV sets by the year 2000 in a $22-billion domestic market is now seen as “indulgent,” said Yukihiro Tajima, an official in the broadcast administration bureau. “It’s wishful thinking at best.”

Nevertheless, once the government launches two new broadcast satellites by 1991 and the first wave of HDTV equipment is ready to hit the consumer market, NHK is prepared to begin regular broadcasts, offering the picture quality of 35-millimeter film and the crisp sound of compact discs.

Commercial Japanese broadcasters are reluctant to make the investment to convert their equipment to HDTV, just as all but a few electronics manufacturers have hesitated to jump on the bandwagon, but analysts predict that it is only a matter of time before they are all forced to follow NHK’s lead.

If the United States rejects the NHK standard while failing to get a high-definition system of its own off the ground, American viewers are likely to remain strapped with an obsolete version of a technology that their engineers once pioneered, the Japanese say.

“If Americans don’t want to do it themselves, they shouldn’t knock the other guy,” said Matsushita’s Fujio. “If they want access to the technology we’ve developed over years of effort, all they have to do is join us. But they shouldn’t just stand back and say ‘no.’ ”

NHK officials are dismayed that despite their offer to open basic technology to any interested party, American industry paid scant attention to HDTV until it emerged as a political issue last year.

“We issued reports to all the international forums and gave demonstrations, but nobody noticed,” said Masao Sugimoto, director of NHK’s science and technical research laboratories. “We said: ‘Look, the next generation of television will be like this!’ But we were ignored.”

Sugimoto said NHK proposed a cooperative arrangement to Zenith, the sole remaining U.S.-owned television maker after the industry caved in to imports in the 1970s, but was snubbed.

(Zenith has said it wants to pursue its own HDTV program in cooperation with the telecommunications giant AT&T--if; it can afford the investment.)

Part of the problem may have been a perception that NHK was pushy about its technology when it started demonstrating it in 1981, giving the impression that it was unwilling to compromise on standards and broadcasting methods.

“Some blame NHK for bringing up the political dispute by being too aggressive,” said a knowledgeable source in one of Japan’s major consumer electronics companies. “They were arrogant in approaching other countries, acting as though it would be foolish not to follow their lead. That turned people off.”

NHK’s proposed standard was endorsed early on by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. But trouble cropped up when the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates broadcasting, ruled a year ago that the next generation of television must be broadcast terrestrially, not by NHK’s preferred satellite transmission method, and maintain compatibility with conventional television sets so as not to render them obsolete.

No problem, the Japanese said. HDTV signals can be beamed on the UHF band, and a converter, costing about $70, will allow the old television sets to pick up the new broadcasts, although the picture would appear no sharper than regular TV.

But now American engineers are fussing over the number of active horizontal scanning lines and worrying about the shape of pixels, the tiny units of colored light making up images on cathode ray tubes. For optimal bending and wrapping of images in computer graphics, pixels, they say, should be square. NHK’s pixels are slightly rectangular. What’s worse, the Europeans, with their proposed standard, are insisting on 50 frames a second, while the Japanese have spent the last 20 years thinking that 60 frames a second is a pretty good idea.

‘A Lot of Politics’

The arcane debate will be taken up early next month, when delegates to the International Consultative Committee for Radio-Communications, or CCIR, meet in Geneva to attempt to work out a single HDTV standard that might be endorsed by the body next year. But odds are that the CCIR’s final decision will be postponed until 1994.

“The problem is there’s a lot of politics going on, not just engineering,” said Richard Wolfe, president of Hi Vision America, a Los Angeles media company that wants to transmit HDTV-formatted motion pictures by satellite to movie theaters around the country.

To Richard Elkus, a Silicon Valley executive, HDTV represents a rare opportunity for the American electronics industry to regroup and devote itself to the not-so-profitable but strategic task of honing its high-technology base. Nineteen years ago, Elkus was in charge of marketing the world’s first consumer videocassette recorder for Ampex when the U.S. company ran into financial difficulty and surrendered its technology--and home market--to corporate Japan.

“If we continue to lose our infrastructure, we’ll end up being a service industry to the Japanese,” Elkus said. “The fact that the Japanese build plants here in no way helps the proprietary interests of the United States to control its own destiny. We can only sell our labor.”

Meanwhile, some of the strongest resistance to the adoption of NHK’s standard is coming not from U.S. manufacturers but from commercial television networks, which see no particular advantage to investing millions of dollars in new broadcasting equipment without any foreseeable return in increased revenues. Their profits are determined by the number of people viewing the ads they run, not the quality of their broadcast signals.

In a compromise, the networks have lined up behind what is called “extended definition” television, or EDTV, which sharpens the image on the tube using advanced electronics, without altering standards.

Still, several U.S. production studios have snapped up the first generation of HDTV cameras, video recording and editing equipment made by Sony and other Japanese manufacturers, using it for advertisements and music videos.

In Japan, HDTV’s sponsors are promoting a range of applications outside broadcasting and entertainment, such as medical instruments, data storage and computer graphics. And they remain baffled by the furor over the medium abroad.

“Ordinarily, you need a victim in economic friction,” said Sugimoto, head of the NHK lab. “But who’s going to be the victim of HDTV? Show me.”