Japanese looking longingly into space

Press, 13 June 1984, Page 19

Japanese looking longingly into space

PETER McGILL

in Tokyo reports on how

Japan is looking into space for better broadcasting and television.

Outer space has received little attention from earthbound Japanese executives, normally eager to embrace the goddess of high-tech. While the Americans were content to burn up billions of dollars to land a man on the Moon, Japanese thought it more fruitful to land their small cars in America.

The new commercial potential of satellites has changed all that, and with "the space business" now "targeted" by the Government as the new sunrise growth area. Japanese politicians and business executives have become almost as passionate about payloads and launch vehicles as their United States counterparts. The Posts and Telecommunications Minister, Keiwa Okuda, recently gave a fine demonstration of this new enthusiasm in a lashing

given to visiting Vice-President George Bush over the failure of Japan’s first direct broadcast satellite (D. 8.5. Supposed to usher in a new media age. two of Yuri-2a’s three transponders (devices that amplify weak terrestial signals and transmit them back to individual antennas on earth) had failed after launching, cutting the satellite's use from transmitting two TV channels plus one back-up to only one possible channel. Since Japan still lags far behind in space technology, Yuri-2a was assembled in Japan with 70 per cent of the parts imported. The vital transponders, incorporating special tubes made by the French company. Thomson-CSF, came from United States giant General Electric in a specially sealed

“black box” to prevent eager Japanese engineers copying the sophisticated technology inside. Although an intensive investigation is still going on in Japan to determine the cause of the malfunctions, Mr Okuda put the blame on the mistrustful United States. Expressing to Mr Bush Japan’s "strong dissatisfaction.” he even warned that the trouble might effect future purchases of United States-made satellites.

Yuri, launched in January, was intended to bring clear TV reception of Japan's two state-owned N.H.K. channels to remote islands

and mountainous and urban areas where signals were jammed: an estimated 420,000 households in all.

N.H.K., and Japanese electronics companies, were also counting on Yuri to being full-scale testing of their promising “high-definition television" (H.D.T.V.) system, that would allow viewers ’to count every wrinkle on the Emperor's face by doubling the number of "scanning lines.” They hope to get it adopted throughout the world.

Electronics firms such as Matsushita and Sony are frantically trying to reduce "the retail price of their H.D.T.V. sets to around $2500

in anticipation of a launch in Japan and the United States later this decade.

Technicians say that N.H.K. will still be able to try out their H.D.T.V. system on Yuri's one functioning transponder between midnight and early morning, when remote island and high-rise dwellers have gone to bed. Whether every Japanese will soon benefit from clearer, sharper TV reception, as all broadcasting switches over from terrestial to satellite transmission, or see the even grander Utopia of H.D.T.V. close-ups of divine wrinkles, is an entirely different matter.

Even without Yuri’s temperamental transponders, the present limited aim of DBS to reach 420.000 deprived households has been a flop. To tune into a satellite

requires having a large parabolic antenna fitted to the outside of one’s house, plus a special receiver next to the TV set: cost — a whopping $BOO to $l2OO.

Makers delivered fewer than 20,000 such sets to stores throughout Japan in time for the N.H.K. launch of D. 8.5., and only about half are believed to have been sold.

"It's technically possible now to transfer all broadcasting to satellite.” says the N.H.K. manager, Takehiro Izumi. “but whether it will actually happen in the next 15 or 20 years depends on the diffusion of satellite receivers among the public and what the Government allows us."

Even he had no idea what lay inside the black box. Copyright — London Observer Service."