Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

by Chris Miller

Makoto Kikuchi was a young physicist in the Japanese government’s Electrotechnical Laboratory in Tokyo, which employed some of the country’s most advanced scientists. One day his boss called him into his office with interesting news: American scientists, Kikuchi’s boss explained, had attached two metal needles to a crystal and were able to amplify a current. Kikuchi knew an extraordinary device had been discovered. In bombed-out Tokyo, it was easy to feel isolated from the world’s leading physicists, but U.S. occupation headquarters in Tokyo provided Japan’s scientists access to journals like Bell System Technical Journal, Journal of Applied Physics, and Physical Review, which published the papers of Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley. These journals were otherwise impossible to obtain in postwar Japan. “I’d flick through the contents and whenever I saw the word ‘semiconductor’ or ‘transistor,’ ” Kikuchi recounted, “my heart would start to pound.” Several years later, in 1953, Kikuchi met John Bardeen when the American scientist traveled to Tokyo during a hot and humid September for a meeting of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. Bardeen was treated like a celebrity and was shocked by the number of people wanting to take his photo. “I’ve never seen so many flashbulbs in my life,” he wrote his wife.