This paper reports the prehistory of software defined radio (SDR) studies in Japan. In 1999, a boom in the field of SDR started in Japan, and this year an ARIB study group completed its final report on SDR. SDR is a recently proposed technology concept and has attracted the attention of many communication engineering researchers. SDR will become one of the most important technologies in advanced communication, broadcasting and intelligent transportation systems on the 21st century. Although SDR has several attractive features, there are also many design issues to be solved. In this work we have examined these issues and discussed a new design methodology for wireless receivers in the SDR era.