Sony’s Go-Go Campaign to Create the Miniature Video Camera : Technology: The Handycam was a daunting design and production challenge. But an all-out drive spawned another Walkman-type winner.

TOKYO —  A tantalizing No Entry sign guards the door to Sony Corp.’s design center, the heart of the consumer electronics empire that has brought the world the Walkman, the Trinitron TV set and the compact disc--all products that people never even knew they wanted until Sony invented them.

Each of the company’s creations comes out of this center, where it is given the sleek, curved, European styling that distinguishes it as a Sony. The look here is cool, low-key, vaguely arrogant.

One of the current stars is a 33-year-old workaholic, an art director, who leaves his wife and son every day at 7:30 a.m. and doesn’t return until 11 p.m. Slim and stylish, smiling from behind dark green horned-rimmed glasses, he is shy but certain enough of his talents to know that he never wanted to design such unglamorous “white goods” as refrigerators and rice cookers.

He was also brash enough to quit his first job at Japan Victor Co., Sony’s archrival. (In a country where lifetime company employment is the ideal, jumps to competitors have the smell of scandal.)

His name is Yuji Morimiya, and he is the virtually anonymous designer of the palm-sized video camera called the Sony Handycam--the company’s biggest hit since the Walkman.

Morimiya drew the first sketches of the Handycam after orders came down from Sony’s top management to shrink--at whatever cost--the company’s clunky old video cameras. His designs required so much precision in the actual product that Sony engineers were incredulous at the thought of bringing them to life. “Common sense told them it was impossible,” says Takashi Kono, a Sony general manager and the chief engineer behind the Handycam project.

And yet, through a uniquely Japanese combination of all-out company mobilization, microchip technology, a willingness to spend huge sums of money without immediate results and--perhaps most important--uncynical devotion to the company, Sony got its invention on the market in record time, and a full year ahead of its competition.

Today, 18 months later, 1 million Handycams have been sold worldwide, and second- and third-generation models are on the market. They were one of the hottest Christmas presents last year. Selling for between $800 and $1,300, the little video camera has been such a money maker that the revenue it has generated has gone a long way toward paying for the company’s $5-billion purchase of Columbia Pictures last year.

The story began, Takashi Kono says, in 1986, when Sony was casting about for a new product to liven up its desultory video line. The existing video cameras with sound-recording ability (camcorders) made by Sony and its competitors were obtrusive and had to be juggled on the user’s shoulder, making tourists who lugged them on vacation look like pack mules. Sony discovered that the only people willing to put up with the inconvenience were yuppie parents eager to record every new gurgle from their babies.

Sony needed a hit. Although the Walkman had been a runaway success, by the mid-1980s the company had been bloodied by the VHS-Betamax disaster.

It was in this environment that Minoru Morio, a Sony senior manager, ordered Kono, one of his finest engineers, to shrink Sony’s existing video camera down to a machine that could fit in the palm of one hand. Japan is celebrated for its “consensus-building” style of management that theoretically includes large numbers of people in all decision making; in truth, at Sony and many other Japanese companies, the “consensus” is usually set from above.

Morio set an 18-month deadline.

“I told him flatly that I couldn’t do it,” Kono recalls. “First of all, what he wanted was one-fourth the size of what we had already designed. You could possibly make it half the size; that was still a challenge. But a one-quarter reduction takes time, and to be given a target date a year and a half away was not technically foreseeable.”

And yet, Kono was well aware that miniaturization had always been Sony’s great genius. Other companies may make better audio equipment, but nobody shrinks better than Sony. Says Kono: “We couldn’t say, ‘We cannot do it.’ ”

So by the end of 1986, Sony launched what eventually was code-named the “55” or “Go-Go” project. (The number 5 is pronounced “go” in Japanese; the new video camera was supposed to appeal to young people on the go.) The camera would use 8-millimeter videotape cassettes, first introduced by Sony in 1985. Smaller than ordinary audio tapes, they are now used in such Sony products as the Video Walkman, a combination color television and VCR shrunk to the size of a small book.

The task was to shrink every part in the existing camcorder, 2,200 parts, by one-half to one-fourth. More crucially, Kono’s engineering team had to develop a new mechanism to drive the videotape through the machine.

In a standard tape recorder, a stationary pick-up head reads the magnetic impulses on the tape and translates them into sound. In videotape recorders, the head has to pick up a lot more information--images as well as sound. Videotape passes around one side of a fast-spinning drum that contains on its outer surface two video heads that read the tape as they themselves spin at a slight angle to the direction of the tape.

In Sony’s new video camera, the spinning drum was cleverly shrunk. But the real breakthrough was to make sure that the tape ran along the drum at exactly the correct angle and speed, requiring a motor mechanism of exquisite precision. “It was like splitting a hair a hundred times to describe how accurately the tape had to run across the rotating head drum,” Kono says.

Sony’s other innovation was to densely pack the Handycam’s circuit boards with microchips and even the mechanical moving parts of the camera, a feat in part accomplished because the company was able to order the parts from its own factories. Sony also went to 120 outside parts manufacturers, and in great secrecy brought them in on the deal.

In January 1988, while Takashi Kono was busy overseeing the shrinking of the thousands of parts that would go into the Handycam, designer Yuji Morimiya, 31, was tapped to do the first drawings.

In the next three months, he fed the specifications into an IBM computer, which spewed back on its display screen blueprint-like drawings of possible video cameras. By March, he had made hand drawings on paper, using color pencil and Magic Marker, and built a squat but sleek model--the R-55--out of Styrofoam.

Usually at the design stage of a Sony product, 95% of the necessary parts have been finalized. But with the Handycam, Sony had only 65% of the parts; the others simply didn’t exist. And the deadline was less than eight months away.

As an example, the design called for a small built-in microphone--”but the mike was only in the development stages in the research lab, and we didn’t even know if it would work,” says Takashi Masuda, the Sony engineer who became leader of the 20-person Go-Go team in January, 1988.

By June of 1988, the microphone was working, and engineers were building new machines to make the circuit boards. Kono selected a Sony factory near Nagoya to assemble the Handycam. By now, he knew it was impossible to meet the 18-month deadline, which came and went. Kono did manage to present Morio with a camcorder that he and the other engineers had been developing at the same time, which was half the size of the existing cameras.

“He was not happy,” says Kono. The order came again to shrink. Holding a small company date book, Sony’s president declared: “I want it this size.”

Back in Tokyo, Sony was gearing up its Handycam advertising campaign. Katsuya Nakagawa, an assistant manager in product planning, had started by looking for market research. He discovered that there was nothing available to answer the question of whether people wanted a smaller video camera. At this point, another company might have arranged an expensive survey, but Sony’s management has always preferred to ignore market research, arguing that it is impossible to gauge public opinion about products that don’t exist.

So Nakagawa charged ahead. “We knew we wanted to change the camcorder market,” he says. “We wanted to expand beyond parents and families.” A magazine ad for one of the larger Sony camcorders had featured former tennis star Jimmy Connors with his wife and two children. Nakagawa decided to junk that approach and concentrate instead on the hordes of affluent Japanese professionals in their 20s who had been taking vacations overseas in record numbers. “We decided to focus on the idea that you could use the camcorder while traveling,” Nakagawa says. The Handycam was still referred to in-house as the R-55, so Nakagawa added a T, to make it TR-55, for travel.

By June of 1989, the Handycam was in stores in Japan, and by that fall it was available in the United States--a couple of years late, but still way ahead of the competition. Sony promoted it as “passport-sized” (it was referring to the Japanese passport, which is bigger than the American), and launched an advertising campaign with commercials featuring Atsuko Asano, one of Japan’s most popular television actresses, using the Handycam while on a jet plane.

Not long ago, when Yuji Morimiya went to see his 4-year-old son in a special sports day at school, he noticed that the father of one of his son’s friends had brought along a Handycam. Morimiya watched the father use it, but didn’t say a word.

In fact, Morimiya sees people all over Japan using the camera, and while it must give him a voyeuristic thrill, he says he often feels more worry than elation. In the same way that a cook knows exactly where corners have been cut and substitutions made in a recipe, Morimiya watches people use the Handycam and frets about its imperfections. “There is no perfect product, or perfect design,” he says.