More “Scientific” Trade Barriers

By: www.kekepana.com/blog

Western Electric 500 - too long
for Japanese faces?

I received an hilarious response to last week’s post about Japan’s history of “scientific” barriers to trade (and why Tokyo’s irritation at recent “scientific” bans on Japanese products is so ironic).

Tom Moore, a good friend who runs a Hawaii-based telecom equipment company called Tropical Telcom, has a long history in Asia and knows Japan well. In the early 1970s, Tom was working for Northern Telecom and was part of Nortel’s team trying to sell phones to Japan’s Nippon Telephone & Telegraph (NTT). [Tom and I didn't yet know each other, but I worked at the time on Washington's negotiations with Tokyo to get NTT to open up its procurements.]

Tom described his arduous negotiations with NTT’s executives, wrestling through all the technical details, pricing, support, ad nauseum – in far more detail than was usual. Tom had expected a reluctant customer, but was taken aback when NTT’s negotiator said that Caucasian faces are much longer than Japanese faces, so that a phone designed for Caucasians could not possibly work for Japanese. The transmitter and receiver must be in the wrong places, so NorTel’s phones could not possibly be considered for Japan.

That evening Tom went to a phone store in Tokyo and bought an NEC 600 standard phone,used by NTT’s customers throughout Japan. Knowing the NEC telephone had been copied from a Western Electric 500, he demonstrated to NTT that the NEC phone had the exact same dimensions as any Western-designed telephone. He had been assured at the shop that this NEC 600 was a standard telephone for the Japanese market, but NTT insisted that this must have been a special export model with a handset modified for western markets. It was several more years before NorTel got a deal with NTT.Tom described his arduous negotiations with NTT’s executives, wrestling through all the technical details, pricing, support, ad nauseum – in far more detail than was usual. Tom had expected a reluctant customer, but was taken aback when NTT’s negotiator said that Caucasian faces are much longer than Japanese faces, so that a phone designed for Caucasians could not possibly work for Japanese. The transmitter and receiver must be in the wrong places, so NorTel’s phones could not possibly be considered for Japan.

Creative thinkers, those guys at NTT.>