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In the second half of the 20th century everyone was talking
about the phenomenal upsurge the Japanese economy was going through, and
the Sony Corporation Akio Morita had created with Masaru Ibuka was a shining
symbol of that spectacular breakthrough. The ultimate fruit of the
forces generating that growth, Sony, unlike other companies who were busily
grabbing the European and American markets, was a relative newcomer with
no roots in the traditional Japanese business. Its success resulted
from a combination of national Japanese tradition and cultural interaction
with the West. Akio Morita was the ultimate manifestation of that mutually
rewarding merger.
He was born in Nagoya, Japan, in
1921, the son of a wealthy sake brewer groomed from the third grade to
become the successor of a 14-generation family business. As the eldest
son, he was destined to someday take over from his father, but as Japan’s
defeat in the war now looked more and more inevitable, especially after
the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945, the life
of Akio Morita, then a 24-year-old student at Osaka University, was never
to be the same again… An educated young man, Akio realized full well that
his country’s technological lag was so gaping that emulating Western technological
know-how was the only right way to go. Raised in an educated family, Akio
was best suited for affecting that much-needed transition. Growing amid
imported household machinery, Akio was a great fan of Hollywood films and,
therefore, a vocal advocate of all cultural things Western.
Falling in love with sound recording gear early
on, Akio Morita made up his mind to single-handedly design a tape reorder.
Because he was all but at the head of his class, Morita had to work real
hard to catch up on his physics. That’s how he became a Ronin – that’s
what ancient Japanese used to call a samurai whose master had either gone
away or died. In the 20th century Ronin meant a laggard student forced
to study all by himself to catch up on the rest of his class. In a sense,
Akio was a Ronin for life always trying to catch up with the West relying
entirely on his own resources.
The would-be Sony Corporation originally started out of a tiny room on
the bomb-shelled university premises in Tokyo where eight people crammed
in all set to launch just about any business. Today it’s hard to imagine
the place the first Sony tape recorder originally came out from. There
was a rope laden with drying diapers barring access to the company headquarters
the would-be millionaires had to ease their way through to get to their
workplace. The roof was leaking, so they often had to open up umbrellas
to stay dry. The manufacturing process was very primitive; the magnetic
tape was made by hand. Morita would cut long ribbons of cellophane tape
adding on all kinds of magnetic substances to make it look like the real
thing. Despite all that start-up hassle, the first Sony tape recorder
came out in 1950. It was a huge box weighing at a whopping 35 kilograms
no one wanted to buy. Morita had to move Stateside to acquire a patent
for the production of the transistor he needed to radically miniaturize
his products. The Japanese obtained the patent and, upgrading the
transistor, geared up to take the whole world by storm. This is when
the original name, SONNY, actually came about. Morita and Sony co-founder
Masaru Ibuka took the Latin world Sonus, lobbed off the last two letters
and added “n” and “y”. However, because the resultant word, SONNY, means
in Japanese “to lose money”, they decided to eliminate one “n” -
hence the mysterious work which has since become a household name all around
the world.
In 1957 Sony came up with the world’s smallest transistor
radio and two years later followed up with the world’s first transistor
TV. More technological wonders followed, and by the onset of the
1980s Sony was already an internationally established electronics giant
looking to consolidate its hard-earned success. Morita was crisscrossing
the world opening up new branches. Like a true-blue Japanese workaholic,
he labored hard and fast, like a firefighter. It was apparently with this
trait in mind, however, that colleagues from his New York branch once gave
him a firefighter’s headset as a gift.
Now 72, Akio Morita kept working on like he did 40
years before that. Each Thursday he would get up at seven in the morning
and head to the tennis court sweating there for an hour or two.
It was there that he ultimately collapsed in 1993 with a
brain hemorrhage spending the next five years confined to a wheelchair…
The 20th century catapulted Japan to unheard of before heights,
but it also confronted it with a maze of serious problems. Akio Morita
did not live to see that. He died of pneumonia in 1999…
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