Hiroshi Kawano, current president of Sony Computer Entertainment Japan, has worn a lot of hats in his career. After joining Sony in 1985, he spent a couple years working as a salesman in the Akihabara district of Tokyo, shilling TVs and Walkmans to passers-by in the world-famous electronics mecca. That changed in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. "All the Communist countries were collapsing after 1989, and since Norio Ohga [Sony's president at the time] had been a music student in Germany once, he had a real passion for the whole region," Kawano told Famitsu magazine in this week's issue. "He wanted to get people into Eastern Europe as soon as possible now that we could do business there -- basically, he wanted someone young, strong, and without a lot of intelligence. I thought I was going to be sent off to America, but then the HR department went to Ohga and said 'I know this is a crazy coincidence, but we've got a guy on standby who satisfies all there of your requirements!'"
How was it behind the iron curtain? "Brutal," Kawano recalls. "I had no office, and I certainly didn't have any employees. I told them that I had no motivation whatsoever for this job. I mean, I couldn't even find any of those countries on a map back then, and they wanted me to start a complete business from scratch. It took about five years, but I managed to get us set up in Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and so forth. It was really a valuable experience -- I rode around in a car with bulletproof glass because there was always this risk that I could be kidnapped."
After returning from Europe, Kawano spent the majority of the ensuing years in America before being recalled to Japan last year to take over SCEJ. His first major project: Spearheading the design process for the NGP, the PSP successor Sony formally unveiled at a Tokyo conference last month. "The NGP isn't something that's driven solely by us at SCE," he told Famitsu, "because in the end, it's got to receive support from gamers. We visited a number of companies to discuss this because we wanted to know and care about what the creators and front-line developers thought. This started last spring, right around when I came to SCE. We received all sorts of opinions from developers, and they liked some things and didn't like other things. That debate process was something I think was extremely important for us -- I think a lot of creators, not just the ones that spoke at our conference, really feel like they were an integral part of the NGP's hardware design process."
Kawano may not have a long career working with video games, but in the interview, he displayed a refreshingly open mind when it comes to user feedback. "When you think about how to make a platform popular and exciting, eventually it all comes down to how the users are participating in the thing," he said. "We need more than ourselves and the software companies -- we need the users, and we also need the media contributing. If we have a clear vision and drive on how to expand our platform and the industry in general, that allows us to expand our ideas and get down to the core of what we're doing. We wouldn't leave everything to the users' whims, but we can turn an eye to them, at least. I want to be able to absorb what users think of the things SCE and the publishers are doing, and I think we'll be establishing a project like that."
SCE had one of its best holiday seasons ever last year, with hardware shortages common in Japan and PSP flagship title Monster Hunter Portable 3rd selling over 4 million copies in a month. But Kawano is wary of resting on his laurels. "Sony's business has shown that after the initial success, there are always challenges that come afterward," he said. "If you hit with something, then you're reluctant to change anything later on. The game industry is no different; it's facing tough challenges partly because of the successes it's experienced in the past. Whether we can overcome those challenges or not depends on how adaptive we decide to be. The thing is, though, we have all the technical skills, the people, and the resources we need to manage that. That's why I think the PlayStation has a bright future ahead of it."
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