[The characters, places, organizations, incidents, and so on appearing in this work have no relation whatsoever to reality and are entirely fictional creations of the author’s imagination.]
――――――――――
July 28, 1979
Henry gazed out the window at Times Square, sinking into a strange mood. The once-chaotic streets had now gone beyond chaos and were racing toward madness.
“Impeach Garter, the traitor who sold out our country!”
“We want a strong America! We are the world’s police!”
The crowd filling Times Square roared at the top of their lungs. In truth, the original text of “The 1979 China Threat Theory” published in [The Time] was a stiff collection of hard data and economic logic that would only appeal to the intellectual class. But the newspapers, which processed it to suit their tastes and spread it around, struck the public mind dead-on with fear marketing.
In places where unions held strong power, such as the Rust Belt, New York, and California, large-scale protests had already swallowed daily life.
‘I showed them the fear of “China’s rise” that they weren’t supposed to experience until the 2020s forty years early, so should I be grateful it’s ending at this level?’
Henry smiled uneasily. His original intention had merely been to give China, which would act up in the future, a light whipping in advance to correct its habits, but the way things were going now, it seemed likely to summon America’s first impeached president.
‘I’ve never even met the old guy once. Sorry about this.’
The prophecy Henry had poured out was like an apocalypse to America’s middle class. The leakage of cutting-edge technology such as semiconductors, the quagmire of debt that would come to exceed the national GDP, and the terrifying synergy that would arise when China’s volume was added to Japan’s precision. He had proven with data how labor cheaper than Texas oil would devour the automobile factories of Michigan and the steel mills of Ohio.
While intellectuals shuddered at the elaborate logic, the masses exploded at a single provocative line the newspapers had drawn out.
[The factory where your child works will be built in Beijing.]
That one line awakened the dormant anger of the Rust Belt. The fear that the suffering of stagflation they were experiencing now would, in the future, lead to the humiliation of becoming China’s subcontracting base. The anxiety that they might have to hand back their badge as the world’s police and go begging created a furious wave.
The trade deficit, the accumulating government debt, the soaring unemployment rate, and even the oil shock. In a situation where every unfavorable factor had overlapped, the “China Threat Theory” became the final nail driven into the coffin of the Garter administration. Garter’s approval rating hit the worst level in history, and the U.S.-China trade agreement, his only candidate for an achievement, was beaten down by public opinion and postponed indefinitely.
‘If the Iran hostage crisis breaks out on top of this, it’ll really be over...’
Henry sank deep into the sofa and fell into thought.
‘Still, hang in there, Brother Garter. If things go wrong, you’re going to be embalmed in textbooks not merely as an incompetent man, but as a high traitor who broke America’s national fortune.’
With the U.S.-China trade agreement postponed indefinitely, China saw both its status as the world’s factory and its grand plan to attract foreign capital vanish like a mirage. The future of China, whose sails of reform and opening had been snapped by a single report Henry had thrown out, now sank into a darkness where not even the next inch could be seen. This was a massive distortion difficult even for Henry, who knew the future, to dare imagine.
‘For now, it’s certain their growth will stagnate for decades compared to my previous life. Then how far will my future knowledge remain valid from here on?’
Henry quickly turned his mind, wondering if the fragments of history he had stirred up might steal away the advantage of being a regressor. But just like last time, he soon reached a conclusion.
‘No, there’s no problem at all. Until the 1990s, China’s economic scale is only a storm in a teacup compared to America’s. Political upheavals like the Tiananmen incident are also scheduled to happen, and it was only after the mobile revolution in 2010 that they threatened America with high-tech technology and rose as the G2. I still have an overwhelming time advantage of thirty years.’
Thirty years. That was more than enough time to climb higher than any asset holder from his previous life. By then, Henry would most likely be struggling even harder to hide his astronomical wealth from the eyes of the media.
And when he thought it over carefully, even if the China he had known were erased from history, there was no way the internet or the mobile revolution, the core driving forces of American development, would disappear. In other words, even if the detailed curves of history were distorted, the “great current of technological development” would not change.
‘The speed at which semiconductor integration rises, the spread of PCs and the emergence of the internet, through the smartphone era and on to artificial intelligence and virtual reality... This isn’t a question of whether China exists or not. It’s an inevitable path that will eventually be reached.’
Henry let out a sigh mingled with relief and excitement at having changed the future with his own hands, then opened his notebook and moved his pen.
[One Times Square Building: When remodeling, stake everything on soundproofing. The current building has no soundproofing effect whatsoever. Impossible to work due to protester noise.]
The impeachment chants coming from outside the window were loud enough to make his ears ache, but Henry, already envisioning the future image of Times Square that he would recreate, turned toward the [Enjoy] office with light steps.
.
.
.
Looking at the Game & Watch that [Enjoy] had churned out at superluminal speed in only two months, Henry sank into a truly strange mood. The result of charging ahead without looking back in order to seize the market lay before his eyes, but the process had been a continuous cold sweat even for him, a former twenty-first-century office worker.
The greatest hurdle was selecting the brain of the game console, in other words the CPU. Not long after the meeting ended, Henry flatly rejected the engineers’ proposal to use an ordinary 8-bit chip.
“The power consumption is too high. Our goal is to last at least a month on two mercury batteries (LR44).”
He had pointed that out first, but the problem was that low-power (CMOS) 4-bit chips had not even spread across the market yet! In other words, they did exist, but actual commercialization was still lacking. So he instantly understood why the engineers had suggested using an 8-bit chip. There simply was no usable chip unless it was an 8-bit chip!
Wiping away his cold sweat, Henry recalled that dizzying memory. It was the price he paid for establishing a company without even verifying whether the historical details in the novel were right or wrong. He immediately put his family office and think tank into full operation and made emergency contact with Japan’s [Sharpf]. He had been anxious that [Nintendore] might already have laid claim to them, but fortunately, they had not even come near the threshold yet.
The negotiations were unconventional. After just three days of intense back-and-forth, they stamped the contract on the fourth day. The more Henry reviewed it, the more he grasped why [Sharpf] had taken such a low posture, and he swallowed a hollow laugh.
At the time, [Sharpf] was suffering from a double hardship: an LCD production line whose operation rate had hit rock bottom, and a new chipset for which they had found no sales channel. Henry dug precisely into that gap. He secured a firm promise that all low-power CMOS 4-bit chips and LCD panels, which had not even reached the mass-production stage, would be supplied to him first. Henry himself took pride in thinking he had put a leash on them, but from [Sharpf]’s perspective, it was a lifeline that made them wonder what fortune had fallen into their lap. He was saying he would buy up everything that might have piled up as inventory, and on top of that, even use their idle factories while paying outsourced production costs.
On top of that, the side contract Henry presented even planted in [Sharpf]’s management the conviction that “a blind sucker from America has appeared.”
At the time, the image of Japanese companies in America was absolutely at its worst. It was a period when famous agencies refused advertisements even if one came carrying bags of money. In the midst of that, the proposal to guarantee advertising space in America’s most authoritative magazine, [The Time], was quite literally a cheat code. Even though the condition was that [Sharpf] would pay the advertising costs, their reason was paralyzed at the promise that he would secure that golden spot for them in advance.
In the end, a strange yet perfect win-win contract was established, where each side looked at the other and felt certain, “I really sucked them dry.”
‘Because I was in a hurry, I think I took a bit of a loss by signing without looking into it properly, but thanks to that, our baby was born this quickly, so let’s call it even. But...’
The first principle Henry established while producing the Game & Watch was clear. Preemption. From his position of knowing perfectly well that [Nintendore] would strike a worldwide jackpot with the Game & Watch in the future, his intention was to snatch that delicious market wholesale.
The second principle was a splendid showcase for the D-pad patent. His calculation was to make every game console company use the D-pad just as in his previous life, then sit back and collect licensing royalties. Because of that, costs and profitability were not even on his radar. Taking full advantage of the fact that he owned 100% of the shares, Henry bulldozed through every practical obstacle like a dictator riding a bulldozer.
“Now. We have our mock-up, and these are the temporary blueprints I drafted. Refine them based on this and proceed straight into mold production.”
“Yes, boss. Hmm... These measurements aren’t in inches, but in mm, millimeters?”
“We’re producing in Japan. There’s no need to use inches. From now on as well, the metric system will be our standard.”
‘Those damn inches! Feet! Gallons!’
From the very start, he joined hands with [Sharpf], and using the drawings he had designed as the prototype, he separately operated a mold production team, a hardware team, and an LCD team, so the outline of the product was taking shape by the day.
“Boss, if we force a 3.5 mm earphone jack in here, we won’t be able to handle the cost.”
“Just do it.”
‘Soon [Shony]’s Walkman is going to become a huge fad, so everyone will be carrying around earphones. If our device doesn’t have a hole to plug them into then, we’ll be left high and dry.’
Every decision was pushed through solely by his own arbitrariness, not through discussion or persuasion.
“Boss, how about reducing the screen size just a little? There’s also the yield issue on [Sharpf]’s side, and the manufacturing cost...”
“If you shrink it that stingily, what kind of desk clock is that? Our company aims for first class even if we make just one thing!”
‘I have no intention of earning pocket change by selling game consoles. Silver investment profits are going to bring in billions of dollars anyway, so what does it matter if we sell a few more machines? All I have to do is preempt the market and sweetly suck on the honey pot called the D-pad license.’
Thanks to focusing all firepower solely on speed and performance rather than profitability, [Enjoy]’s development progress shot up at an unimaginable pace. But Henry suddenly wore a displeased expression and fell into thought.
‘No matter how I think about it, didn’t I seriously dump shit all over [Nintendore]’s path forward? At this rate, it seems like [Sharpf] won’t even have the capacity to cooperate with [Nintendore]...’
In the history of his previous life, the opportunity for [Nintendore] to leap into becoming a giant game company came thanks to the massive hit of its handheld game console. Until then, they had been a company that made hanafuda cards, and had been driven to the brink of bankruptcy after ruining everything they touched, from toys to taxis, love hotels, even baby strollers and instant rice.
Then, at the suggestion of factory equipment maintenance engineer Gunpei Yokoi, what they released in cooperation with [Sharpf] was precisely the Game & Watch. But Henry had preempted [Sharpf], that key partner, wholesale. So it was questionable whether the current [Nintendore], with neither technology nor capital, could even properly make something called a game console.
‘Did I stop these guys from actually making it, only to shoot some delusional misunderstanding plot all by myself, thinking I’m preempting them right now...?’