ntially more damaging international confrontation, when, over the course of about five months, the issue of the extent of American access to the Japanese cellular telephone market was resolved.
The early 1990s were a time of rapid and multivaried expansion for the American high-technology industry in general and Motorola, Inc., an Illinois-based manufacturer of a range of high-tech equipment. In 1992, Motorola management was predicting with a good deal of confidence that its Asian operations would account for the bulk of all its revenue through the next 10 years, based on the fact that sales of the company's cellular telephones, pagers, and other mobile communications devices, as well as of semiconductor chips, the basis for all high-tech products, were increasing faster in Asia than in either Europe or the United States Asia-based manufacture of Motorola's semiconductors was well in place in 1992, in Japan, India, and Hong Kong, and plans were under way to begin manufacture in the People's Republic of China in 1994. In part, such predictions were a consequence of a 1989 agreement between the United States and Japan "to expand opportunities for Motorola Inc.'s cellular telephone sales" in the latter country. Motorola's cellular telephones were manufactured in Illinois at that time, although by 1994 Motorola had opened a cellular factory in Europe and China.
The major political factors in the push to open the Japanese cellular market in 1994, as in 1989, were the governments of the United States and Japan, at the chief-executive, diplomatic, and trade-negotiator levels, as well as Motorola. In the 1980s, under the Reagan administration, Motorola sought an opportunity to sell its cellular-telephone equipment in what was then Japan's infant cellular market. The agreement that followed, however, entailed unanticipated factors. The American view was that it took the shape of "a 'shotgun marriage' with a Japanese telecommunications...