Pacific: The Ocean of the Future. Simon Winchester
country was gripped by a spasm of self-repair, of make-do and mending, of precipitous institutional about-faces and adaptations. Factories that had weeks before been making war materials switched their production lines to start making items needed not by generals and admirals, but by the bone-tired civilians and by the ragged menfolk returning from the battlefields. So bomb casings became charcoal burners, sitting neatly upright on their tail fins and helping households get through that first bitter winter. Large-caliber brass shell cases were modified as rice containers, while tea caddies were fashioned from their smaller shiny cousins. A searchlight mirror maker turned out flat glass panes to repair thousands of smashed Tokyo windows; and for country dwellers, a fighter plane engine piston maker turned his factory to building water pumps. A piston ring fabricator named Soichiro Honda took small engines used during the war as radio generators and strapped them onto the frames of Tokyo’s bicycles—the resulting Bata-Bata motorcycles, the name being onomatopoeic, later evolved into a brand of bike still famed from 1950s Japan as the Dream. Its popularity and commercial success heralded the birth of today’s automobile giant, the Honda Motor Company.
As with Honda, so with the company that would soon be founded by Ibuka and Morita. It was Ibuka himself who first set matters in train. Within moments of the emperor’s broadcast to his nation, announcing the surrender, Ibuka told his radar-making colleagues that he was returning to Tokyo, immediately. He had divined, with what now seems almost messianic clarity, that the country’s future depended on engineers and on their ardent use of technology. He also believed that only in the country’s capital was such progress possible.
As he packed his bags, he dared others to go with him. Six men did—one of them, Akira Higuchi, remarking later that he made his decision “in two shakes, and left without a second thought. It was as if we were communicating telepathically. I followed him then, and I have never left him.”
Higuchi, who eventually became Sony’s head of personnel, was much like Ibuka: a memorable figure. He was a formidable mountaineer, for example, and in later life kept a globe in his office studded with tiny flags indicating the more than one hundred peaks he had scaled. He was still employed by Sony into his eighties and celebrated his eighty-fifth birthday on the top of a ski slope near Lake Tahoe, in the California Sierra.
So Ibuka and Higuchi and their five colleagues took themselves down to Tokyo and promptly set up shop. They managed to rent for a pittance a cramped third-floor room in a near-derelict department store building, and bought desks and worktables. They first agreed on a name, Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute, though they then changed it, twice, before finally agreeing on Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company—in Japanese, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, familiarly to be called Totsuko.
Despite having no business or any real idea of what the company might do, make, or even dream about, Masaru Ibuka next wrote out a formal company prospectus. The handwritten ten-page document—written vertically on horizontally lined paper, with blots and crossings-out, and the uncertain look of a schoolboy essay—is preserved now in a specially made glass display case in the Sony archives in Tokyo. It still offers a model for what a company, anywhere in the world, might aspire to be.
According to an equally lovingly preserved English translation of the prospectus, the purpose of Ibuka’s firm was “to establish an ideal factory that stresses a spirit of freedom and open-mindedness, and where engineers with sincere motivation can exercise their technological skills to the highest level.”
We shall, he pledged, “eliminate any unfair profit-seeking exercises” and “seek expansion not only for the sake of size.” Further, “we shall carefully select employees . . . we shall avoid to have [sic] formal positions for the mere sake of having them, and shall place emphasis on a person’s ability, performance and character, so that each individual can fully exercise his or her abilities and skills.
“We shall distribute the company’s surplus earnings to all employees in an appropriate manner, and we shall assist them in a practical manner to secure a stable life. In return, all employees shall exert their utmost effort into their job.”
Finally, his new company would help his country. Its formally stated national intent was to help “reconstruct Japan, and to elevate the nation’s culture through dynamic cultural and technological activities.”
Yet this high-flown language—in truth more Grandisonian than grandiloquent, as the firm’s later progress would show—masked many early difficulties. Neither Ibuka the man nor Totsuko his company had any real idea what to make. The first invention was a crude electric rice cooker, no more than a wooden tub with a flat aluminum element at its bottom. You poured in rice and water, plugged in the device, and the mixture’s conducting wetness triggered the switch that powered up the heating element. The rice was cooked and duly dried, and the nonconducting dryness broke the circuit and switched the device off. It was in theory a fine and clever idea—except, the vagaries of the year’s crop made it almost impossible to cook the rice properly. Sometimes it was fully cooked, sometimes not. Sometimes the machine switched itself off while the rice was still wet, like porridge. At other times the cooked rice was quite dry but had the consistency of a fistful of shotgun pellets. As a result, Totsuko’s first foray into the mercantile world was a complete dud, and the hundreds of rice cookers languished unbought on the office shelves, for years.
But before long the firm did in fact find its feet, once Ibuka had insisted that instead of flailing around with some truly eccentric ideas (building miniature golf courses on bomb sites, selling sweetened miso soup), his engineers stick to their core pursuit: electronics. So, by the end of 1946, when Akio Morita, newly released from the navy, joined his new friend’s firm, the business model swiftly focused the minds of all the employees on one particular and widespread electronic need: the repair of radio sets.
All Japanese households owned radios, but during the war some had been damaged by the bombings, and others had been destroyed by the much-feared Japanese secret police, the Kempeitai, who had campaigned to stop civilians from listening to American shortwave propaganda. Now, with peace returned, households wanted cheerful music; they wanted to hear such news as the American censors allowed (official announcements, information), and radio was the obvious best means of disseminating it. So Ibuka and his team—now swollen to more than twenty, outgrowing their one-room premises to fill one floor of the old department store—began doing real business. A reporter from Asahi Shimbun stopped by. Ibuka, with his shrewd sense of what made good PR, must have delighted in the resulting article, which described his radio repair business and reported that the work was being performed “quite apart from any commercial motive.” The door was soon thronged by customers bearing broken radios.
Steadily the inventive energies accelerated—as did the quality of the technical work. The firm first made a voltmeter that was mundane enough in its own right, but cleverly enough designed and built that it got the attention of occupation forces’ quartermasters, who sent samples back to America to be used as benchmarks of technical excellence. Suddenly a Japanese machine was winning kudos beyond Japan. Then Ibuka, swelling with pride, made the first fully functioning and complex electrical device that would perform the kind of task for which the firm would eventually win worldwide fame. He made a tape recorder.
This machine was expensive both to develop and to construct, but it eventually sold in respectable numbers. He was able to build it because Akio Morita and his old, rich, and highly traditional family decided to put money, serious money, into the young company. It was the firm’s first investment, at the now-legendary sum of 190,000 yen. The Morita Company, run at the time by the fourteenth generation of farmer-dynasts, had for centuries concentrated on businesses sacred to the spirit of the nation: on the growing, harvesting, and storage of rice and soybeans and on the delicate brewing of sake, miso, and soy sauce. Yet now, and with remarkable prescience, the clan elders were able to discern a future of a very different kind. Helped in addition by an abiding faith in the artless genius of Masaru Ibuka, the family chiefs felt a stirring of commercial possibility—and instructed their son and presumed heir1 to join the new firm as partner, and go back down to Tokyo and utterly transform the Pacific world.
Ibuka was fascinated by the idea that the human voice, music, the sounds of daily life,