Pacific: The Ocean of the Future. Simon Winchester
drown out the broadcast.
But those few who had passed by electrical stores in downtown Winnipeg and Edmonton, in Toronto and Montréal and Vancouver—most especially Vancouver, which at the time had a sizable Japanese population, who had some prior knowledge about such things—would have noticed on sale that month a small boxlike device made from greenish-brown plastic that, all who saw it swiftly realized, brought an answer to their summertime prayers.
It was a radio set no bigger than your hand, with no wires connecting it to anything. Until August 8, when this device first went on sale, most radio sets had been pieces of furniture. They were, by and large, behemoths made of walnut veneer that needed to be dusted and polished, and that more often than not provided a resting plinth for potted plants. But this little box was different. It wasn’t furniture at all. It ran off batteries and didn’t have to be connected to the wall. It was lightweight, didn’t need time to warm up, and in fact didn’t get warm; it emitted sound the moment you turned it on, and it could go anywhere—certainly well beyond the oppressive heat of an August living room. You could use it outside, under the shade of a tree, in the cool beside the fine spray from the sprinkler. It was so neat and tidy, with its tiny plastic feetlets, that you could set it down on a table in the yard or on the lawn itself, or on a table on the porch—or it could be carried to and fro as you wished, perhaps as you went to the icebox to fetch another bottle of Molson.
It was a pretty little thing, very modern, very midcentury. Most of it seemed to be a loudspeaker, with a grille and scores of tiny perforations. There was a small red and black wheel on the side that turned it on and off, and another to adjust the volume. On the front right-hand side was a dial and a knurled, revolvable disk that allowed you to change from one CBC station to another. On this disk were words, most probably unrecognizable to all but the immigrant Japanese: “Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo,” which in English meant “Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company.”
There were two other words on the front of the little device. In raised plastic lettering across its top was embossed a lately created but suddenly quite familiar description of the electronic organelle that lay in the beating heart of this radio, and that essentially, if incomprehensibly, made it work: TRANSISTORIZED.
Then, in a minuscule oblong space above the tuning wheel, a space easily overlooked, there was the second word, which was destined to become one of the best-known brand names in the world. That word was SONY.
The tentacles of what would become a giant global corporation, whose inventions would affect the ways many millions of people took pleasure from their lives, had started extending their way east across the Pacific. The Japanese electronic century, as some would call it, had officially slithered into existence.
It is tempting to suppose that Sony sent its first radios to Canada rather than to the United States for reasons having much to do with the Second World War, then only a decade past. But the truth is more mundane. A Canadian businessman named Albert Cohen, wandering through Japan in search of opportunities, happened to spot an advertisement in a Tokyo newspaper seeking a distributor for a new kind of radio. He arranged an appointment, sought and offered terms that were mutually agreeable, closed a deal on a handshake, and lugged a crate filled with fifty radios back to his company headquarters in Winnipeg. That Sony’s first beachhead beyond Japan was thereby established among the grain elevators and green expanses of the North American prairies, a world away from Asia and the great blue expanses of the Pacific Ocean, speaks volumes: an early hint that the Pacific’s economic and cultural reach was to be unimaginably vast, almost limitless.
The man with whom Albert Cohen had his first dealings in the summer of 1955 was Akio Morita, the better-known and most public face of what would become the Sony Corporation. In 1955, Morita was well on his way to becoming the elegant silver fox of Japanese electronics. He was worldly, sophisticated, patrician (the silkily affluent heir to a Nagoya sake-brewing dynasty), and a visionary. He had a degree in physics, but he was not, strictly speaking, an engineer. And the beginnings of Sony—indeed, the beginnings of everything that would underpin Japan’s remarkable revival after the ruin and humiliations of a roundly lost war—were rooted solidly in the world of engineering and in the grimy hands of its practitioners.
Happily the man who was to be Morita’s cofounder of Sony, the much less well-remembered Masaru Ibuka, was a true engineer, a classic of the breed. By the time the pair first met, in 1944—when Ibuka was already thirty-six, a great crag of a man; bluff, myopic, and shambling; ursine and untidy; and towering over the twenty-three-year-old Morita—Ibuka was already known as a tinkerer, a maker, an inventor. In 1933, when he was still at university, he had been handed an early award (a Gold Prize from the Paris World’s Fair) for devising a way to make the glow in neon lamps appear to flow—so-called dancing neon, created by attaching a high-frequency power supply to one end of a neon tube and varying its output, a technique still much used today in advertising signs.
He was captivated by all things mechanical. He was a ham radio operator, had made his own gramophone, and had built a pair of stupendously large loudspeakers for use in a local sports stadium. He collected music boxes, player pianos, and organs, and to amuse himself, he had a remote-controlled helium balloon. He was also entranced from childhood by model railway trains, and would in time become president of the Japanese Association of Microtrains. More often than not he could be found on his knees on the tatami, reconnecting a length of miniature railroad track or tightening the screws on a steam locomotive.
It was the summer of 1944, and one desperate, last-ditch effort by the Japanese military to reverse the tide of what was now clearly an unwinnable war, that first brought Ibuka and Morita together.
The munitions ministry wanted to devise a new kind of antiaircraft missile, to harry and maybe bring down some of the American B-29s that, with their relentlessly lethal firebombing campaigns, were so devastating Japanese cities. They turned to a Tokyo maker of naval radar, the Japanese Instrument Measurements Company (JIMCO), and ordered the young naval lieutenant Morita, who had a degree in physics, to act as liaison.
Ibuka was the managing director of JIMCO, and from their first meeting, his inventive genius entirely captivated Morita. He was evidently a true lateral thinker, years before the concept was born: to solve a problem concerning the oscillations of a new radio transmitter, for instance, he had hired a score of young women, all of them music students from a nearby college, to employ their perfect pitch to help him adjust the radio to the exact frequency of a tuning fork. Such ingenuity! Morita thought. Such imagination! Ibuka-san, rough around the edges though he might be, and with a Tokyo workingman’s accent, was one memorably creative individual!
Either the heat-seeking missile was never made or else it did no good, for eight months later the war was over. But the professional collegiality that had sprung up between Morita and Ibuka developed swiftly into an inseparable and lifelong friendship. The first stirrings of creative energy soon began to display themselves.
Japan in the immediate aftermath of the war was steeped in a miasma of misery. The population—throughout Japan, though most particularly in the capital, Tokyo—was afflicted by a hitherto unknown condition that had been given a new name, plucked from psychiatrists’ manuals: it was kyodatsu, a phenomenon that mixed exhaustion with despair in equal measure.
Hardly surprising: Barely half the inhabitants had a roof over their heads. One in five had tuberculosis. On all sides in the capital were ruined buildings, broken water mains and sewage drains, shattered schools. There was no public transportation: all the buses were destroyed; the trolley lines and their cars had been obliterated. There were the daily degradations and humiliations of the American occupation; there was a pervasive lack of work and its kin: a want of money and widespread beggary and destitution. There was also, or so it seemed, a collapse in society’s moral fiber, with gang warfare, prostitution, thievery, and black marketeering pasted onto a national sense of remorse, guilt, resentment, and a deeply felt, unfocused, and chance-directed bitterness.
Yet, for all that, as 1946 got shakily under way, something curious happened: the Japanese people began to ready themselves, though they knew it not, to rise up and display a mettle quite unimaginable in its scope, heft, and range. And the Pacific Ocean was the theater in which this display was to be most vigorously mounted.