BIG IN JAPAN
Morita Akio
 In a
country famous for its love of miniaturization, no product is as synonymous with this
trend as the Walkman, no company more famous for it than Sony, and no man more responsible
for it than Morita Akio, co-founder of what is now Japan' most famous brand of
electronics, with global sales of $56 billion dollars last financial year.
Morita was at the helm of Sony for forty years until a stroke whilst playing tennis in
1993 (when he was 72) forced his retirement. His health slowly deteriorated until his
death last October, at age 78.
Born to a wealthy sake-brewing family in Nagoya in 1921, Morita served in the Imperial
Navy in the Second World War, where he met Ibuka Masaru. A tinkering scientist from birth,
Morita rejected the family business and, with Ibuka, came to Tokyo in 1946 and founded
Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, a two-man electronics operation in a shack in Shinagawa.
The two had innovative ideas from day one. They developed Japan's first tape recorder,
using paper instead of the usual vinyl which was unavailable in postwar Japan. To prevent
the paper from tearing, their product had to be incredibly precise. The first recorder was
sold to a noodle shop for karaoke before the government began to buy them for schools and
courtrooms. "We're a couple of sonny-boys," Morita liked to say. Combining
"sonny" with "sonic," the brand Sony was born, a name to indicate
youthful exuberance.
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| Photos courtesy of Sony |
Their major break came in
1953 when Morita bought a license from America's Western Electric Co. to make transistors,
a device, they told him, that would be useful only in hearing aids. Instead, Morita and
Ibuka used them to make portable radios, first in a long line of products that challenged
conventional wisdoms: the transistorized television, the Trinitron color TV, the hand-held
video recorder, the compact disc and so on. Morita firmly believed in leading consumer
tastes rather than following them, and always maintained that the Walkman - a product that
was his idea and which he named himself - would never have been made if they had conducted
research beforehand to ask people if they would buy it.
Morita certainly had his share of business disasters as well. His Betamax video recorder
failed dismally when his insistence that the cassettes be no larger than a paperback book
meant that they were too short to store an entire baseball game on one tape. The 1989
purchase of Columbia Pictures was also a costly venture, which knocked $3 billion off
Sony's profits when the Hollywood studio failed to perform to expectations.
Morita possessed an international perspective on business almost unique among Japanese
industrialists; he was also the only Japanese to be included in Time magazine's
list of the 100 most influential people of the twentieth century. Speaking flawless
English, he travelled constantly, lived in New York for a while and had his children
educated abroad. Yet despite his global view, he remained deeply traditional at heart. He
disinherited his eldest son, Hideo, for marrying without his consent, and co-authored with
now governor of Tokyo Ishihara Shintaro the book "The Japan That Can Say No,"
the English translation of which caused Morita much embarrassment. But to most, Morita had
an irresistible personality - good-looking, personable, jovial and full of conversation,
traits which made him somewhat of a personality in international circles, a glamorous star
amongst the generally drab Japanese business community.
Charles Spreckley |
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