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Celebrating The Yamamoto Years Copyright 2003, W. David Tarver Last Saturday night, I attended a friend’s retirement party. It wasn’t the typical retirement party, though. We didn’t gather at the Lincroft Inn, we made our rendezvous at the Blue Fin restaurant in the W Hotel Times Square. The retiree was not a local engineer buddy, he was a special colleague who flew in from Tokyo for the occasion. My friend and mentor Mineo Yamamoto is retiring on October 31. The scene at the party last Saturday was as one might expect, considering a guest list comprised of a Japanese techie and his American techie counterparts. Lots of cameras. The latest electronic gadgets being passed around the dinner table for show and tell, nearly knocking over martinis and full glasses of wine. It was the only fitting way to celebrate Mr. Yamamoto’s retirement.
I met Mr. Yamamoto back in 1987. I had left AT&T Bell Labs only a few years earlier, in 1983, to start Telecom Analysis Systems (TAS). By 1987, TAS products were starting to catch on. Mr. Yamamoto heard about our products, and he called me about having his company, Toyo Corporation, sell my company’s products in Japan. Soon after that, he visited my company’s office in Little Silver to make the case for why Toyo should be our distributor in Japan. Toyo was the largest distributor of electronic test equipment in Japan, and Mr. Yamamoto was very upbeat about the prospects for our products, so I signed him up as our distributor. We agreed that I would soon visit Japan to help promote the sale of our products there. I will never forget my first trip to Japan in 1988. Mr. Yamamoto wanted me to come there and give a seminar to Japanese engineers. The seminar was held at the Toyo headquarters in Tokyo, and was attended by the leading engineers from the leading companies in Japan – companies like Sony, Sharp, Matsushita, Ricoh, and many more. I was very nervous about giving the seminar. Japanese engineers had a reputation of being very sharp and very detailed. There would be no BS-ing this crowd. Then there was the issue of race. I really didn’t know how Japanese engineers would take to a young black engineer from the U.S. in the role of company president and subject matter expert. Would they listen to what I had to say, or would they snicker and write me off? Mr. Yamamoto anticipated my nervousness. He countered with thorough preparation. He and his team arranged my company’s test equipment into displays that looked better than anything we had done in the U.S. Then he assembled his staff, and together we did a complete rehearsal of the seminar. This lasted late into the night on the eve of the seminar. During the rehearsal, Mr. Yamamoto gave me some sage advice: "Japanese engineers have much respect for Bell Labs. Tell them you are from Bell Labs". I got the picture. The next morning, I faced a room 70 or 80 of Japan’s finest electrical engineers, all serious, all immaculately dressed in white shirts and ties. I began my presentation: "Good morning. My name is Mr. Tarver, and I am the President of TAS. Before starting TAS, I worked for Bell Labs." Then I paused so Mr. Yamamoto could translate. I could just pick out the words "Tarver-san" and "TAS" and "Bell Labs" The engineers sat there transfixed from that point on. Mr. Yamamoto might as well have said that I was the President of Bell Labs. After the seminar, the Japanese engineers lined up to buy our equipment, and in the ensuing years we sold millions and millions of dollars of equipment in Japan. That seminar was my introduction to Mr. Yamamoto’s skills as a businessman. In the ensuing years, I got to know him as a person. We solved a lot of difficult technical problems together, but we also had a lot of fun. I learned that Mr. Yamamoto is a jazz aficionado, and we spent many hours together experiencing the Tokyo jazz scene. I learned that he is an expert in the Japanese art form Gyotaku (fish printing), and I made my own print during a lesson with the master himself. I learned that Mr. Yamamoto has many talents and many interests, but most importantly, I learned that he is a great husband, father, and friend. So on the occasion of his retirement, I just want to say to Mr. Yamamoto: Congratulations, my friend, and thanks. I hope that the next Yamamoto Years are as rich and as full as the last ones have been. (note to the reader: TAS is now called Spirent Communications Eatontown and is still thriving. If you want to see more information about Mr. Yamamoto, see his fish-printing web site at www.gyotaku.ca, or see my web site at www.DavidTarver.com ). David Tarver October 28, 2003 En route from EWR to LAX |
