Take a stroll through home sweet home. You'll almost certainly see an entertainment system, refrigerator, microwave oven, rice cooker, toaster, mixer/blender, vacuum cleaner, heater/air conditioner, hair dryer, electric blanket and so on. From personal hygiene to food preparation to recreation and entertainment, electric appliances are a ubiquitous part of our daily lives.

For the previous half century, the Japanese consumer-electronics industry enjoyed a extraordinarily successful run as both innovator and competitor, capturing dominant market shares of everything from calculators and boom-boxes to microwave ovens and video cassette recorders.

Among its manifold products, certainly none have held the aura of television, referred to in Japanese as kaden no ōsama (the king of appliances). So said not because TV was necessarily the most expensive or essential, but because people spent more hours per day looking at it than everything else combined. "It's like having a billboard to promote your brand right in the customer's living room," a PR spokesman at a manufacturer explained to me years ago.