Toward Creativity In Japan : ‘Steve Jobs of Japan’ Dispels Old Myths

Don’t tell Kazuhiko Nishi that Japanese people aren’t creative.

After all, he’s the charismatic Wunderkind--the “Steve Jobs of Japan”--who dropped out of a prestigious university to become the nation’s chief evangelist of the personal computer revolution.

At age 21, in 1977, he started a computer magazine publishing firm. Renamed ASCII Corp., it is now Japan’s largest software publishing firm.

At 22, he talked Microsoft Corp. into making him its sole agent in Japan.

At 23, he persuaded NEC Corp. to let him help develop Japan’s first personal computer. That year, he also marketed the nation’s first packaged software.

At 26, with the assistance of Microsoft, he designed the world’s first mass-produced portable computer--the Radio Shack TRS 80 Model 100.

At 27, he developed the MSX computer standard, persuading Sony, Matsushita and other Japanese electronic giants to adopt it. Four million machines using the MSX standard have been sold, although it has not swept the market as initially envisioned.

At 33, Nishi made history again by becoming the youngest corporate president to take a Japanese company public. He raised $40 million in Tokyo’s over-the-counter market.

ASCII’s per-share prices have almost quadrupled to $100 from $26. Annual sales have doubled since 1986 to $200 million for the fiscal year ending March, 1990. Profits have grown 20%.

Now at the ripe old age of 34, Nishi is a regarded as a brilliant technologist and silver-tongued salesman. He is at work on satellites, semiconductors, Hollywood films, an aviation school and all manner of new products, including a pocket-sized computer with a split keyboard that folds in three.

Along the way, he has confounded expectations and proven that creative thought and deed are hardly the province of the West. Even the way he talks about creativity is, well, creative:

“There are two types of creativity: the creativity of making zero to one and the creativity of making one to 1,000,” he said over a white custard dessert at ASCII’s headquarters in Tokyo. “Making zero to one is called originality. Making one to 1,000 is called the art of manufacturing. Japan is thinking about the art of manufacturing, plus at the same time it is thinking about making originality.

“It’s just a matter of time” before Japan breaks out of its creative binds, Nishi added. “Everybody has the consensus of the need to move in that direction.”

With such flourish, the baby-faced Nishi has managed to command confidence from executives twice his age in a nation that stresses seniority. He has managed to mesh a dashing lifestyle of chartered jets, a $20-million art collection and a country home with Japan’s conservative climate. Nishi says his secret is simple.

“What you need to do is maintain compatibility with existing society. In your own company you can be as creative as you want. But when you have to talk to the bank, you have to behave like an ordinary Japanese.”

To behave like an “ordinary Japanese” means, for starters, that Nishi drives around town in a black company car--not the Bentley that he ordered custom-designed to the same specifications developed for Prince Charles. Still, he has occasionally provoked grumbles by coming on too strong, sources said.

In interviews, Nishi can appear soft-spoken, speaking barely above a whisper at times. He can seem disheveled, with a rumpled suit and long hair. But associates say that when he springs into action before investors or clients, he is spellbinding.

Microsoft executive Ron Hosogi recalled one particularly tough sell with a Japanese electronics firm, which was balking at starting a project with Microsoft amid the personal computer slump in 1984. Within 30 minutes, Nishi “turned a roomful of skeptics into believers,” Hosogi said.

“He can paint pictures and have people say yes. In a Japanese environment, where you usually meet with 15 different levels over a period of weeks, doing it in 30 minutes is shocking,” he said.

And Nishi generally delivers on his visions, associates say.

“He’s a genius,” said Fumio Otsuka, general manager of information processing and electronic systems for Mitsui & Co. “His vision is always correct. So everybody trusts Nishi.”

Otsuka said every joint project between ASCII and Mitsui has made money. The firms have collaborated repeatedly on such projects as the laptop computer, semiconductors, graphics systems and facsimile machines.

That kind of track record has quieted questions about his youth.

“Those old-age executives are charmed by Nishi, and they’re getting something new from him,” Otsuka said. “In this kind of new industry, where it’s difficult to catch up with technological changes, age doesn’t make any difference. He understands the direction of revolutionary trends.”

Married, with two daughters, Nishi credits an unusually enriched childhood for his success. His family founded a girls’ secondary school in Kobe, raising Nishi in an environment of libraries, music, art and newfangled machines called computers.

After his father went to bed, the 9-year-old would sneak into the study, wrench off the computer cover with a screwdriver and pound away on early, rudimentary Wang and, later, Hewlett-Packard models.

Why? He pauses in thought.

“Because they were there,” he concludes.

By the time he entered Waseda University in Tokyo, he was a computer fanatic. His room was always littered with vacuum tubes and electrical wires.

In 1978, as the personal computer age was dawning, Nishi took a fateful step toward what would become ASCII’s most celebrated linkup. He made a cold call to William Gates, chairman of Microsoft, and ended up as the firm’s exclusive software distributor in Asia.

Although the association helped Microsoft gain its present 65% market share for operating systems in Japan, the two men had a falling out in 1985 over future directions. Nishi wanted to branch into semiconductors, but Gates’ interest was strictly software.

“The guy’s life is a mess,” Gates said then, without elaborating.

“If I stay in Microsoft, I have to work for Bill Gates,” Nishi said. “Here, I can work for myself.”

Nishi’s vindication came last September. When he took ASCII public, it was viewed as a decisive rebound from loss of its most important business partner.

ASCII opened a U.S. operation in San Jose in April to invest in leading-edge technologies, including systems and applications software. Another new venture is a satellite communications business. In April, the company set up a joint venture with Mitsui & Co. and C. Itoh & Co. to offer a rapid data transmission service for stock quotations, supermarket prices, teletexts, still pictures and the like.

Along with new investments in Hollywood, which Nishi would not detail, he is continually stretching his vision of ASCII --and himself--as mass communicators.

He owns 2,000 compact discs and reads “two or three feet of books” a week from his 10,000-volume personal library. He writes commentaries for newspapers. He gives speeches. He lectures at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is constantly interviewed, and in the interviews he is philosophical, colorful and unabashedly direct.

“Everybody perceives me as an ordinary businessman,” Nishi said. “I think I am quite extraordinary.”