If a modern-day Rip Van Winkle were to fall into a deep sleep for the next ten or 20 years, he might wake up to the whoosh of trains being propelled through the air by superconducting magnets. He might observe crowds of commuters toting supercomputers the size of magazines. In average homes, he might see 7-ft. TV images as crisp as 35-mm slides and enticing new food products concocted in the lab. But if he could read the labels on those futuristic creations, he might also discover the outcome of America's struggle to remain the leading technological superpower. Sad to say, a majority of those products might well bear the words MADE IN JAPAN.
That is the worrisome analysis of U.S. experts in Government, industry and academia. Virtually every week seems to bring fresh evidence that Japan is catching up with the U.S. -- and often surpassing it -- in creating the cutting-edge products that long were the turf of U.S. firms. Last week the American Electronics Association reported that from 1984 through 1987 electronics production rose 75% in Japan, vs. a paltry 8% in the U.S. Most ominously for the U.S., Japan made its gains in increasingly sophisticated components, such as the disk drives and optical-storage devices used for today's higher-powered computers. Says L. William Krause, chairman of AEA: "The Japanese are eating their way up the electronics food chain."
Now come indications that Japan is ahead in developing many of the building blocks of 21st century technology. Last week a presidential panel reported that U.S. efforts to exploit recent breakthroughs in superconductivity were seriously fragmented alongside Japan's. The Japanese have not only filed more than 2,000 patents worldwide, but have already started to develop motors and generators using the superconductors. U.S. projects are still in the planning stage and, in the words of the report, "unlikely to survive what we believe will be a long-distance race."
U.S. researchers harbor similar fears about falling behind in a broad range of disciplines, from optical electronics to supercomputers. While the U.S. is still plowing ahead in pure science, American industry has fallen behind in the race to turn those advances into products that are reliable, reasonably priced and directed toward the needs of consumers. "America is probably the world's greatest innovator nation," says Robert White, president of the National Academy of Engineering, "but we don't have the ability to capture the benefits of those scientific discoveries." The risk is that the U.S. will lose its competitive advantage even before the marketing contest has begun.
For the U.S., the good news is that the Government is waking up to the threat from Japan and beginning to respond in a very Japanese way: by encouraging rival firms to cooperate rather than compete on the most difficult research tasks. The U.S. is making concerted efforts in several strategically important fields: