Semiconductor History | ホテルオークラ, 虎ノ門 — The Tokyo Declaration Was a Phone Call

The room in this photograph was demolished. It was the lobby of the Hotel Okura's main building, photographed on 29 August 2015, two days before the building closed for good.

On the morning of 8 February 1983, in this hotel, 이병철 picked up a telephone and called Seoul.

He reached 홍진기 at the 중앙일보 and told him to announce it publicly: Samsung was going into semiconductors, whatever anyone said about it.

That telephone call is what Korea calls 도쿄 선언, the Tokyo Declaration.

There was no speech and no audience. The most consequential industrial decision in modern Korean history was a founder in a hotel room instructing a newspaper to print something.

The reasoning had been assembled over the preceding year. A team sent to Silicon Valley in January 1983 came back with numbers for what a memory business would cost to build, and a finding that Japan was ahead of the United States in memory specifically.

Lee is recorded as underlining that passage. If Japan could do it, so could Korea.

The written declaration came a month later, as a manifesto published on 15 March 1983 under a title that asked why Samsung was going into semiconductors at all.

It needed to ask. Korea had no DRAM industry, the incumbents were American and Japanese, the product was a commodity whose price collapsed on a cycle, and one production line cost more than most Korean companies were worth.

Contemporary accounts record the plan being called megalomania.

Ground was broken at 기흥 that September, and the first line was finished across the following winter.

The hotel outlasted the decision by thirty-two years.

The main building opened in 1962, designed by 谷口吉郎 for the era of the Tokyo Olympics, and its lobby became one of the most admired interiors in postwar Japan: hexagonal lantern clusters, latticework screens, and low lacquered tables set out in the shape of plum blossoms.

When the owners announced its demolition in 2015, architects and preservation groups campaigned internationally to stop it, and did not.

The building came down. The Okura Tokyo opened on the site in September 2019, and its Heritage Wing contains a recreation of this lobby, built to the design of 谷口吉生, the original architect's son, using salvaged lanterns, tables and the world clock from the room in the photograph.

You can stand in that lobby today. It is a careful copy of a room where a phone call was made that neither the hotel nor most of its guests would have noticed at the time.

This memory sits in a Korean collection and is pinned in Tokyo, because that is where the decision was taken.

Photo: PekePON, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (the main lobby of the Hotel Okura Tokyo, 29 August 2015).