This year's Kyoto laureates, from left: Robert Dennard, for advanced technology; Masatoshi Nei, for basic sciences; and Cecil Taylor, for arts and philosophy. — Steve Chapple
KYOTO, Japan — Kyocera is a company you don’t see.
Most of its products are hidden inside other devices, things such as ceramic insulators inside dishwashers and microwaves, ceramic clay cradles for chip sets in most of the world’s phones, and solar cells. It makes two or three items you do see, like industrial-strength office copiers and a new cellphone with microphones in the glass display so that it’s waterproof.
All that translates into $14.6 billion in sales — a net sales increase this year of 15 percent — and a pretax profit of $1.5 billion — an increase for the first half of the year of 93 percent. About 17 percent of Kyocera’s sales come from the United States, radiating from the company’s San Diego headquarters, which employs 575 people.
Some of the spike in profits is attributable to increased sales of solar cells in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear reactor crisis. But, perhaps, it’s also because the company’s 63,000 employees follow the very un-American, very Japanese, and very cool Intellectual Capital motto: “Respect the divine and love people.”
It is the personal motto of founder Kazuo Inamori, 81, who a few years back shaved his head and became a Buddhist monk only to return to society and make formerly bankrupt Japan Airlines into one of the most profitable airlines in the world, using his “amoeba” theory of management.
“It has been my lifelong belief that a human being has no higher calling than to strive for the greater good of humanity and the world,” said Inamori, before endowing the not-for-profit Inamori Foundation, which now has assets of $800 million.
The foundation gives out the Kyoto Prizes — call them the “Eastern Nobels” — in basic sciences, advanced technology, and arts and philosophy, three areas the Swedes and the dynamite-king Alfred Nobel mostly missed a century ago.
So, here we are, the Intellectual Capital crew in Kyoto, Japan, chatting with this year’s three laureates. They are:
• Robert Dennard, who invented Dynamic Random Access Memory (D-RAM to you), which allowed chips to be miniaturized and thereby made possible laptops, iPads and cellphones.
The cheerful, outgoing Dennard, working as a senior scientist for IBM, changed the world as we know it. He has a theory of creativity, he told me one afternoon, that rural kids, left to themselves to run around and think, often raised in one-room schoolhouses like him, are the ones that knock it out of the park.
• Masatoshi Nei, who devised mathematical methods to measure how far back different species branched off from common ancestors, which is called Nei’s Genetic Distance. It is how we know how far we are from chimpanzees (1 percent difference, thank you), or how we know that humans migrated out of Africa some 100,000 years ago, branching into Europe and Asia and down into Latin America, and rather precisely when.
Nei, quiet, ultra-methodical, blind in his left eye from toying in 1946 with an American detonator left over from a bombing raid on his village, carefully took me step by step through why his analysis of the molecular evidence convinces him that mutation of genetic materials drives evolution, not natural selection, which is still, of course, important. Nei has a new book out from Oxford, “Mutation-Driven Evolution,” which he believes will challenge Charles Darwin, who, of course, was not working from a modern knowledge of genes and chemical DNA.
“I think ‘Mutation-Driven Evolution’ will prove controversial,” Nei says to me in a penthouse suite of the Grand Prince Hotel. He almost whispers as he stares across the table with one dark eye. Nei thinks big. Very big. Life at the speed of light. Then he chuckles.
• Cecil Taylor, the great jazz composer. Taylor alternately smashed and caressed the piano with jet-streams of sound and energy in several amazing performances at the Kyoto Concert Hall and the Hotel Okura, accompanied by the interpretive dancer Min Tanaka. It was like watching Baryshnikov break himself down in pieces and cover the stage like a hip-hop hummingbird six feet tall.
“The dynamic motive power of life is rhythm,” Taylor once said.
Breakfast with Taylor, 84, is a gravelly voiced account of musical history. He tells how “Thelonious” (Monk) played like a child, marshaling his energy from within and touching the keys with the balls of his fingers; and how “Miles” (Davis) had a rough personality (Taylor had a clear-eyed twinkle in his eyes, as he told of the great trumpet player), and how the real Bojangles once tap-danced backward from Harlem to Midtown; and why Hemingway struck Coleman Hawkins on the jaw in Paris one night.
It’s the height of science, computers, music and dance in one Zen hot-spot, the center of Japanese Zen, in fact: Kyoto, 228 miles from Tokyo. The koi are jumping; the Japanese maples are turning russet and vermilion, shades of yellow (Inamori ran a study to make sure the annual ceremonies would be held on the day when most leaves would change, Nov. 10). We dine on baby anchovies, cod roe, ahi belly in ginger and soy, chicken skin on skewers and Kobe beef in late-night restaurants famous and obscure in this ancient Japanese capital of 1,200 temples.
It’s a carefully choreographed trip, 5,798 miles from La Jolla, and it will all be reprised starting March 19, 2014, across San Diego, with Taylor wailing away on a grand piano at the University of San Diego, Nei astounding San Diego’s large audience of evolutionary cognizati courtesy of UCSD, and Dennard explaining capacitors, transistors and the explosive changes the development of the integrated circuit has brought to us all whether we know it or not, with a lecture at San Diego State.
In Kyoto, we were accompanied by several San Diego board members of the Kyoto Prize Symposium, including executive director Richard Davis; Chairman David Doyle of Morrison Foerster; Rod Lanthorne, the former president of Kyocera USA; landscape architect Dennis Otsuji of the Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park; Jay Scovie, director corporate communications for Kyocera Int., Peter Farrell, co-founder of ResMed; Ray McKewon, president of the Xceptional Music Co.; Paul Robinson of the San Diego Airport Commission; Trudy Stambook of Meridian; and Jan Davis, a former teacher of AP history at Cathedral Catholic High School; as well as Mary Lyons of the University of San Diego; Bob Brower of Point Loma Nazarene University; Steve Relyea of UCSD; Nahum Dimitri Chandler of UC Irvine and Steve Welter of San Diego State, among others.
See you in San Diego.
KYOTO, Japan — Kyocera is a company you don’t see.
Most of its products are hidden inside other devices, things such as ceramic insulators inside dishwashers and microwaves, ceramic clay cradles for chip sets in most of the world’s phones, and solar cells. It makes two or three items you do see, like industrial-strength office copiers and a new cellphone with microphones in the glass display so that it’s waterproof.
All that translates into $14.6 billion in sales — a net sales increase this year of 15 percent — and a pretax profit of $1.5 billion — an increase for the first half of the year of 93 percent. About 17 percent of Kyocera’s sales come from the United States, radiating from the company’s San Diego headquarters, which employs 575 people.
Some of the spike in profits is attributable to increased sales of solar cells in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear reactor crisis. But, perhaps, it’s also because the company’s 63,000 employees follow the very un-American, very Japanese, and very cool Intellectual Capital motto: “Respect the divine and love people.”
It is the personal motto of founder Kazuo Inamori, 81, who a few years back shaved his head and became a Buddhist monk only to return to society and make formerly bankrupt Japan Airlines into one of the most profitable airlines in the world, using his “amoeba” theory of management.
“It has been my lifelong belief that a human being has no higher calling than to strive for the greater good of humanity and the world,” said Inamori, before endowing the not-for-profit Inamori Foundation, which now has assets of $800 million.
The foundation gives out the Kyoto Prizes — call them the “Eastern Nobels” — in basic sciences, advanced technology, and arts and philosophy, three areas the Swedes and the dynamite-king Alfred Nobel mostly missed a century ago.
So, here we are, the Intellectual Capital crew in Kyoto, Japan, chatting with this year’s three laureates. They are:
• Robert Dennard, who invented Dynamic Random Access Memory (D-RAM to you), which allowed chips to be miniaturized and thereby made possible laptops, iPads and cellphones.
The cheerful, outgoing Dennard, working as a senior scientist for IBM, changed the world as we know it. He has a theory of creativity, he told me one afternoon, that rural kids, left to themselves to run around and think, often raised in one-room schoolhouses like him, are the ones that knock it out of the park.
• Masatoshi Nei, who devised mathematical methods to measure how far back different species branched off from common ancestors, which is called Nei’s Genetic Distance. It is how we know how far we are from chimpanzees (1 percent difference, thank you), or how we know that humans migrated out of Africa some 100,000 years ago, branching into Europe and Asia and down into Latin America, and rather precisely when.
Nei, quiet, ultra-methodical, blind in his left eye from toying in 1946 with an American detonator left over from a bombing raid on his village, carefully took me step by step through why his analysis of the molecular evidence convinces him that mutation of genetic materials drives evolution, not natural selection, which is still, of course, important. Nei has a new book out from Oxford, “Mutation-Driven Evolution,” which he believes will challenge Charles Darwin, who, of course, was not working from a modern knowledge of genes and chemical DNA.
“I think ‘Mutation-Driven Evolution’ will prove controversial,” Nei says to me in a penthouse suite of the Grand Prince Hotel. He almost whispers as he stares across the table with one dark eye. Nei thinks big. Very big. Life at the speed of light. Then he chuckles.
• Cecil Taylor, the great jazz composer. Taylor alternately smashed and caressed the piano with jet-streams of sound and energy in several amazing performances at the Kyoto Concert Hall and the Hotel Okura, accompanied by the interpretive dancer Min Tanaka. It was like watching Baryshnikov break himself down in pieces and cover the stage like a hip-hop hummingbird six feet tall.
“The dynamic motive power of life is rhythm,” Taylor once said.
Breakfast with Taylor, 84, is a gravelly voiced account of musical history. He tells how “Thelonious” (Monk) played like a child, marshaling his energy from within and touching the keys with the balls of his fingers; and how “Miles” (Davis) had a rough personality (Taylor had a clear-eyed twinkle in his eyes, as he told of the great trumpet player), and how the real Bojangles once tap-danced backward from Harlem to Midtown; and why Hemingway struck Coleman Hawkins on the jaw in Paris one night.
It’s the height of science, computers, music and dance in one Zen hot-spot, the center of Japanese Zen, in fact: Kyoto, 228 miles from Tokyo. The koi are jumping; the Japanese maples are turning russet and vermilion, shades of yellow (Inamori ran a study to make sure the annual ceremonies would be held on the day when most leaves would change, Nov. 10). We dine on baby anchovies, cod roe, ahi belly in ginger and soy, chicken skin on skewers and Kobe beef in late-night restaurants famous and obscure in this ancient Japanese capital of 1,200 temples.
It’s a carefully choreographed trip, 5,798 miles from La Jolla, and it will all be reprised starting March 19, 2014, across San Diego, with Taylor wailing away on a grand piano at the University of San Diego, Nei astounding San Diego’s large audience of evolutionary cognizati courtesy of UCSD, and Dennard explaining capacitors, transistors and the explosive changes the development of the integrated circuit has brought to us all whether we know it or not, with a lecture at San Diego State.
In Kyoto, we were accompanied by several San Diego board members of the Kyoto Prize Symposium, including executive director Richard Davis; Chairman David Doyle of Morrison Foerster; Rod Lanthorne, the former president of Kyocera USA; landscape architect Dennis Otsuji of the Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park; Jay Scovie, director corporate communications for Kyocera Int., Peter Farrell, co-founder of ResMed; Ray McKewon, president of the Xceptional Music Co.; Paul Robinson of the San Diego Airport Commission; Trudy Stambook of Meridian; and Jan Davis, a former teacher of AP history at Cathedral Catholic High School; as well as Mary Lyons of the University of San Diego; Bob Brower of Point Loma Nazarene University; Steve Relyea of UCSD; Nahum Dimitri Chandler of UC Irvine and Steve Welter of San Diego State, among others.
See you in San Diego.
