"Well, let's back up a notch. Since I don't want to bad-mouth your new client, why don't you let me give you what I'll call a purely hypothetical case." He sipped at his Scotch. "Let's suppose you were a Japanese guy, like Matsuo Noda for instance, and you wanted to take over some strategic American industry and ship it to Japan. How'd you go about it?"
"Have a drink, counselor." He plunged forward. "And let me tell you a little fairy tale. About how Matsuo Noda ate the American semiconductor industry."
"It was MITI actually. But Noda was running the Ministry when they did it, and he was the guy who set up the play."
"Yep. Vice minister. Then he went on to greener pastures, being the Japan Development Bank, and left the details to another MITI honcho by the name of Kenji Asano. According to my sources, though, it was Noda who handled the tricky part, the money, after he went over to the bank. Got it together, laundered it, and dispensed it."
"Can't think of a better word. MITI carefully made sure the kickoff funding from the Japan Development Bank got passed through a shell organization called the Japan Electronic Computer Company, hoping nobody would trace it back to the government."
"I think you're starting to see things, but I'd like to hear this little fantasy."
"Okay, off we go to the land of make-believe. Once upon a time not too long ago and not too far away, a few guys at Intel or Bell Labs or some damn place got the mind-boggling idea you could shrink down a computer's memory and put it onto a little sliver of silicon no bigger'n a horsefly's ass. Various outfits tinkered around with the concept and eventually it got commercialized. Lo and behold, Silicon Valley was born, where they start turning 'em out by the bucketful. By '78 we're talking a five-billion-dollar industry. Kids barely old enough to drink legal got so rich they just gave up counting the money."
"That it was. Now, they were making a memory chip called a 16K RAM, that's sixteen thousand bits of Random Access Memory storage. Orders are pouring in, and they can't buy the BMW's fast enough out in Silicon Valley."
"Well, there's more. Seems Noda and Asano and their honchos at MITI had been watching this and thinking over the situation. They decided, probably rightly, that whoever's got the inside track on these computer chips has the future by the balls. Twenty years from now there's nothing gonna be made, except maybe wheelbarrows, that don't use these gadgets. So round about '75 they concluded they ought to be the ones in the driver's seat. MITI 'targeted' integrated circuits."