House of Controversy : Technology: A new computer standard automates the TRON home with 1,000 microprocessors. Some American firms, however, are leery of Japanese intentions.

Tucked away in one of Tokyo’s most fashionable neighborhoods, a house thinks, senses and acts on its own.

It can tell when to snap on the lights by sensing your body heat. It knows when to open the windows, air-condition the room and water the plants. It will flush the toilet, flip on the faucet and air-dry your hands, all without human help.

If the phone rings, it mutes the stereo. If you want to cook a French meal, it will set the correct oven temperature after presenting a recipe and how-to video on a kitchen monitor.

The Jetsons haven’t come to Japan. This is the TRON house, a fully intelligent home where hundreds of electronic brains work together like a squadron of invisible servants. The $6.7-million experimental home is the showpiece for a far-ranging project between Japanese industry and academia that ultimately aims to link millions of microprocessors in consumer appliances, business machines, industrial systems and telecommunications networks in one giant, cooperative web.

To many Japanese, the TRON house offers an intriguing glimpse at what the nation can produce when it combines a creative vision with its technological strengths and love of practical gadgetry. TRON, or “The Real-Time Operating System Nucleus,” also represents the nation’s first creative breakaway from the dominant standards of U.S. companies such as International Business Machines Corp. and Intel Corp. Japanese electronics firms have generally incorporated those U.S. standards in their machines--paying fees for the privilege--but they are aiming to develop their own independent standards for software and computer chips through TRON.

“Japan’s computer industry has been copying the U.S. for over 40 years. Just copying. No original creations,” said Kazuhiko Nishi, founder of one of Japan’s largest software firms, ASCII Inc. “TRON is the first to be creative.”

But the TRON project also illustrates the controversy that Japan may face as it strives to develop its own technologies through more creative science and engineering.

Aside from the question of whether anyone would want to live in such a house--it brings to mind Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times”--some Americans are suspicious of TRON for reasons that go beyond lifestyle. They see it as an ominous Japanese attempt to end U.S. dominance in 32-bit microprocessors, which are the computer’s brains, and in operating systems, the set of instructions that tell the software how to behave.

“The Japanese don’t want to say it, but they were hoping to displace Intel and Motorola for 32-bit microprocessors,” said Sheridan Tatsuno, head of NeoConcepts, a high-tech research firm in Fremont, Calif. He added that Hitachi, Fujitsu and Mitsubishi Electric were each devoting 100 researchers to developing computer chips based on TRON specifications.

Another U.S. concern is that the TRON standards will compete with UNIX or MS-DOS, two U.S. operating systems that dominate today’s “open architecture” standards. At present, the world computer industry is trying to create universal standards for computers, thereby solving the major problem of incompatibility between systems. TRON’s creator, University of Tokyo professor Ken Sakamura, has challenged Japanese computer giants to champion their own standard, rather than passively follow U.S. designs.

“Japan is an economic superpower and must act the part. A heavyweight contender must be prepared to slug it out for the title,” Sakamura wrote last July in a Japanese newspaper.

To make matters worse, the U.S. Trade Representative’s office singled out TRON as a potential market barrier. U.S. trade officials feared that the Japanese Ministry of Education would require 700,000 school computers to be based on TRON specifications, which would favor Japanese manufacturers, rather than general criteria that more foreign bidders could meet. Another concern was that Nippon Telegraph & Telephone would likewise require TRON specifications for its operating system.

Only a few U.S. firms, such as IBM and WordStar of Novato, Calif., have developed hardware and software based on TRON standards. As a result, some Americans fear that TRON is a Japanese ploy to use domestic standards to limit foreign competition, which has occurred in the past on U.S. products ranging from baseball bats to skiing equipment.

The U.S. software industry group, ADAPSO, concluded in a 1989 report on Japanese software that TRON had “strong undertones of nationalism and will have the practical effect of impeding foreign penetration of the Japanese market.”

But Sakamura said his project has been widely misunderstood.

“TRON is not a plot to conquer the world,” he said during a speech in Tokyo last year. “In the current climate of trade friction, anything new and Japanese is immediately considered an economic threat by people in other countries.”

Sakamura described his creation as the world’s first total computer architecture--that is, the first integrated system of hardware and software capable of linking millions of computers in everything from rice cookers to satellite systems. Although smart houses and other “intelligent” products exist in the United States and elsewhere, Sakamura’s project is distinguished by its extensive scope.

The Tokyo professor of information science said a single TRON standard would unify the world’s computer market, giving Western firms an equal chance to compete in Japan. All of the hardware and software blueprints are publicly available for the cost of membership in the TRON Assn. Annual fees range from about $23,000 a year down to $4,600. Among TRON’s 147 members, 17 are foreign, including Motorola, Intel, IBM, Apple Computer and Texas Instruments.

“It’s a competitive system, yeah, but we’ve never been against competition,” said IBM spokesman Mac Jeffery. “We got involved because we saw the possibility that there would be a market for TRON products, and we wanted to be part of it.” Unlike the general observer status taken by other foreign firms, IBM submitted a prototype workstation for the school computers project and is also participating in a communications system.

Sakamura also claimed that the system, which incorporates automatic translation capabilities, would lay the groundwork for unprecedented global communication.

“Instead of just paying attention to supercomputers or artificial intelligence, which are popular topics, I wanted a project that deals with the computerization of society directly,” Sakamura said in an interview.

“While computer technology is being applied in more and more areas of our lives, and household facilities and appliances are becoming ever more sophisticated, many people feel utterly bewildered by the rapid pace and increasing complexity of technological progress,” he said. “What we need is not a random collection of gadgets, but a total system anyone can master.”

Figures on total TRON spending, composed exclusively of private funds, are not available. A Hitachi spokesman said the firm had spent $66 million on TRON chip development so far and hoped to win a 25% share of the TRON-based market for 32-bit microprocessors by the year 2000.

A source at another Japanese firm would not give spending figures but said IBM’s dominance worldwide and NEC Corp.’s near-monopoly of Japan’s personal computer market were “prime motivators” for its participation in the TRON project. “Read this as a desire to compete with the big guys,” the source said.

Should Japanese computer users switch to the TRON standard, it could mean big losses for American competitors. But few envision that scenario. Tatsuno predicted that it will be “almost impossible” for TRON to knock out UNIX or MS-DOS as a standard operating system in the business machines market. He speculated, however, that it would make its mark in home electronics and automobiles because the Japanese dominate both markets.

Microsoft is confident it can retain its 65% market share of PC operating systems in Japan, said Ron Hosogi, a company director.

Other Americans flatly predict that TRON will flop in the market.

“The TRON house looks to me like an electronic whiz kid’s dream. It’s like the 1938 World’s Fair vision of the future,” said Gib Hoxie, a senior consultant with the Los Angeles office of Arthur D. Little, a technology consulting firm.

He said consumers are already disgruntled with digital videocassette recorders and microwave ovens. They find dials easier to use and are moving toward them again.

“TRON isn’t addressing that at all. They say, ‘Let’s pull all of this together in a universal digital interface.’ That’s a nightmare to me. It means I can’t run anything in my house,” Hoxie said. After some research last fall, he concluded that TRON “would be of no lasting significance” in the computer market, and he no longer follows it closely.

International controversies aside, the TRON house has been a big hit since opening in December. On one drizzly day, about a dozen people gawked their way through the tour, shaking their heads and smiling over the house’s endless surprises.

Take the toilet. It measures your blood pressure and analyzes your urine. Then it records the information in your computerized medical records.

How about the roof? Weather sensors constantly measure the outdoor temperature, humidity, air pressure, wind velocity, wind direction, rain and light. Then the system opens the windows to pleasant breezes or closes them and turns on the air conditioning.

In all, the house uses 1,000 microprocessors. There are 20 telephones, including a waterproof phone for the bathroom and a “no-contact” phone in the toilet. The home computer features an innovative keyboard conforming to the human hand to avoid strain. And, in what the brochure bills as an “audiophile’s dream,” every room boasts speakers and switches that can change the music from stereo sound to amplified music mimicking a concert hall.

Built in collaboration with 18 firms, such as Nippon Homes and Mitsubishi Electric, the home is stunningly designed in natural materials: blonde Japanese oak, tatami (straw mats), rice paper screens, marble and stone. A traditional Japanese tatami sitting room contrasts with a high-tech kitchen floored in marble.

Sakamura, meanwhile, is hard at work on an intelligent car, an intelligent city and a 12-story, $35-million intelligent office incorporating more than 10,000 microcomputers set to open next year.

“What motivates me is the delight I feel in creating new things, and the sense of wonder which I feel when I see something new or something wonderful,” Sakamura said. “In the end, the results of the current TRON activities will be accepted. I am quite sure of this.”