Akio Morita: The Man Who Sold Japan to the World
When Sony's first pocket transistor radio proved fractionally too large for an ordinary shirt pocket, Akio Morita had his salesmen wear shirts with oversized pockets rather than change the advertising. The anecdote is trivial and entirely characteristic. He was the co-founder of a company built by an engineer, and his own instrument was not the circuit but the market — the conviction that a product's meaning is something you construct as deliberately as its casing.
A Brewing Family, Since 1665
He was born on 26 January 1921 in Nagoya, into a family that had been brewing sake and making miso and soy sauce in Kosugaya, on the Chita peninsula in Aichi prefecture, since 1665. As the eldest of four children he was raised to take over the brewery, and his father took the succession seriously. Morita's attention went elsewhere, to mathematics and physics and to the mechanics of sound reproduction. He read physics at Osaka Imperial University and graduated in 1944, into a country losing a war.
Commissioned as a sub-lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Navy, he was assigned to a wartime research group working on infrared-guided weapons. There he met an older engineer named Masaru Ibuka. The partnership that followed lasted the rest of their working lives.
A Radio Repair Shop in the Ruins
In 1945 Ibuka set up a radio repair business in the wreckage of the Shirokiya department store in Nihonbashi, Tokyo. Morita read about it in a newspaper and went to join him. In 1946, with capital of ¥190,000 put up largely by Morita's father — the brewer financing his heir's defection — the two men incorporated Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, with about twenty employees.
They made magnetic recording tape in 1949 and sold Japan's first tape recorder in 1950. Then came the decision that made the company. In the early 1950s Ibuka secured a licence from Bell Labs to manufacture transistors. American licensees were mostly interested in military and computing uses; Sony pointed the technology at ordinary consumers, and in 1957 produced a pocket-sized, fully transistorised radio. In 1958 the firm renamed itself after its export product rather than its home market, taking Sony from the Latin *sonus*, sound, and the American slang "sonny."
America
Morita went further than exporting. He founded Sony Corporation of America in 1960 and, in 1963, moved his family to the United States to learn the market from inside it. He came back with an idea that was heretical in Japan: he had watched American firms hire experienced people in mid-career, and began recruiting the same way, against the lifetime-employment orthodoxy. Other Japanese companies eventually followed. In 1961 Sony became the first Japanese company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, through American depositary receipts.
He succeeded Ibuka as president in 1971 and became chairman in 1976 when Ibuka retired. The products of those years defined consumer electronics: the first Betamax home video recorder in 1975; the Walkman in 1979, which invented portable personal listening as a category; the world's first compact disc player, the CDP-101, co-developed with Philips in 1982; the 3.5-inch floppy disk the same year, which the whole industry adopted; and the Discman in 1984.
Hardware, and the Software to Play on It
Morita's later strategy rested on a thesis he called convergence: that a company selling the machines should also own what plays on them. Sony had entered a joint venture with CBS Records in March 1968, with Morita as president; roughly twenty years later it bought the CBS Records Group outright, acquiring Columbia and Epic. In 1989 it bought Columbia Pictures Entertainment, including Columbia and TriStar. The purchases were enormously expensive, provoked a wave of American anxiety about Japanese ownership of Hollywood, and took years to justify themselves. Norio Ohga became chief executive that same year.
Morita also wrote. *Gakureki Muyō Ron* (1966) argued that academic credentials are a poor predictor of business ability — a direct attack on the Japanese examination hierarchy. His 1986 autobiography *Made in Japan* was read worldwide. Least happily, he co-wrote *The Japan That Can Say No* (1991) with the politician Shintaro Ishihara, a critique of American business practice; when an unauthorised English translation circulated and the book became a diplomatic irritant, Morita withdrew his chapters and distanced himself from it.
Why Akio Is Called a Genius
The formal recognition was unusually broad for a businessman: the Royal Society of Arts gave him its Albert Medal in 1982, the first Japanese recipient, and Britain an honorary knighthood in 1993. In 1998 Time named him among the twenty most influential business figures of the twentieth century — the only Asian on the list.
The capacity being recognised is a kind of applied imagination about demand. Morita repeatedly built markets that did not yet exist. The transistor licence is the clearest case: the component had been developed for military and computing work, and Sony's insight was that its real value lay in making a radio small enough to carry. The Walkman rests on the same move — a device with no recording function, aimed at a use nobody had articulated. Morita's instrument was product definition: deciding what a machine should be for.
The counter-case is real and should be stated plainly. He was not the engineer. Ibuka held the technical vision and secured the transistor licence; Morita's contributions were commercial, organisational and diplomatic. His judgement failed more than once: Betamax lost the format war to VHS, the Hollywood acquisitions were punishingly costly, and he retracted his own most provocative book. What survives is not technical genius but something rarer — an exact sense of how an object will fit into an ordinary life, and the nerve to build for a customer who does not yet exist.
What He Left
Morita was a keen golfer and tennis player. In 1993 he suffered a cerebral haemorrhage on a tennis court; it left him severely weakened and in a wheelchair. He stepped down as chairman on 25 November 1994, handing the post to Ohga, and died of pneumonia in a Tokyo hospital on 3 October 1999, aged seventy-eight, after two months as a patient there. Japan awarded him the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun posthumously.
The company he built with Ibuka out of a bombed-out department store became one of the largest consumer electronics manufacturers on earth. But his more consequential achievement was reputational. "Made in Japan" was a byword for cheap goods when he began; by the time he finished, it was a promise. Morita, more than any other single person, changed what those three words meant.
Achievements
- Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire
- Commander of the Legion of Honour — 1998
- International Emmy Directorate Award
- Educated at University of Osaka
- Worked as businessperson, engineer and physicist
