The man who built Sony

Akio Morita, co-founder and chief executive of Sony, is possibly Japan’s most important post-war industrialist. This is a review of his book, written with Edwin Reingold and Mitsuko Shimomura, Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony (Collins)

Author’s note, 2018

In 2012, Sony declared more than ¥500bn ($6bn) in losses, its worst ever. It announced 10,000 redundancies, and, by the spring 2013, sold its US HQ at Madison Avenue, New York City, for more than $1bn.

Now, however, the company has sold an astonishing 525 million PlayStations, and may earn getting on for $2 trillion in 2018 through streaming music. In smart phones, Apple, Samsung, LG and even Nokia and HTC have largely extinguished Sony’s efforts. But in high-end TVs, the company is back, reaching nearly 40 per cent of world market share.

In 1987, though, Japan had yet to enter the years of sclerosis with which everyone is now familiar. Back then, Japan still looked as if it could completely conquer the living room – if not the world. That hasn’t happened, but the firm and its share price have staged a remarkable revival.

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A good read for managers, this is less fun for designers. Anecdotal, name-droppy and immodest, it still fascinates on the man, the company and the country. The style is personal, relaxed and – unlike so many management texts nowadays – unpretentious: no doubt Time’s Ed Reingold has helped here. The pictures are however a disappointment. For a far superior handling of all those silvery products, the reader should find Stephen Bayley’s excellent Sony design (Conran Foundation, 1982).

Morita, first born son of a rich, Buddhist, sake-brewing family, was brought up on fine ceramics, furniture and paintings. The Toyoda family, makers of cars, were right across the street. Pa’s board meetings were boring; physics and tinkering with wireless were not. Choosing to avoid wartime death by signing up for a lifetime career in the navy science, Morita met his partner to be, Masaru Ibuka, making heat-seeking weapons. He writes well about the 1940s: of streamlined, air-conditioned ‘Asia’ trains in Manchuria, of buying vacuum tubes from RCA, and of Nagoya, home of the Zero aeroplane.

In practice, ‘peace’ in 1945 meant that one in five Japanese had tuberculosis and that children were fed rice one grain at a time. Morita began his firm with umbrellas over his desk to catch the leaking rain; meanwhile, cars had to burn rubbish for fuel (the author returns to the Japanese passion for saving waste and energy in a chapter on technology).

Morita made mixing units for NHK, Japan’s BBC, and, noting a Wilcox-Gay tape recorder, built a 35kg version of his own. He spotted a shortage of stenographers in Japan’s harassed courts, and moved into legal and thence educational recording markets.

Told by Western Electric, parent company to Bell Labs, that its new transistor devices were good only for hearing aids, Morita doggedly found $25,000 to buy the patent for the technology. He then gave his salesman shirts with specially big pockets, and so came out with a pocketable transistor radio in 1957. He wrote ‘Made in Japan’ in tiny letters on his products, but had a keen eye for brand names: Morita’s account of the etymology of Sony and of Walkman should be a lesson to Britain’s all-too-numerous Illiterate designers.

Sony’s impact has been considerable. It was first with transistorised Trinitron, handheld and wall-sized (25 x 40m) TVs; 8mm video; U-Matic and Betamax tapes; CD and portable CD; filmless cameras, and – back in 1960 – Japanese stock on the American Depository Receipts (ADR) market. Sony dropped out, wrongly, from calculators, but today sells half Japan’s headphones, runs a Maxim’s in Tokyo, and imports choppers from France’s Aerospatiale.

Today Morita writes bestsellers knocking academia, while his wife hits the bookstalls with tracts on how to hold dinner parties. But Morita omits the fact that Sony is three times as indebted to Japan’s banks as Matsushita. Moreover some of his stated views are exceptionable.

The author attacks Japan’s failures in basic research, its lengthy meetings, its expatriates and America’s lawyers. He argues that a third of America’s deficit with Japan stems from US firms based in Tokyo, and that 85 per cent of America’s TVs come from Sony’s plant in California: ‘Americans’, he opines, ‘get so emotional’.

He praises Mrs Thatcher’s export salesmanship, lasers, loudspeakers designed for German gutturals, and Japan’s silent fridges (kitchens are next to bedrooms in Japan). But he is on much shakier ground eulogising Japan as an egalitarian ‘one-race nation’, complete with familial management styles, redundancy-free employment policies, and no-frills offices.

Morita favours labour-intensive industries for the Chinese, a greater role for Japan in the third world, and the rewriting of its pacifist constitution.

Me, I baulk at all this.