Akio Morita

AT A restaurant in Dusseldorf in the 1950s Akio Morita was served with a bowl of ice-cream decorated with a miniature parasol. The friendly German waiter pointed out that the paper bauble was made in Japan. For Mr Morita it was a disheartening experience: that the world associated “made in Japan” with trinkets and cheap imitations. For the rest of his working life he sought to prove to foreigners that “made in Japan” meant originality, quality and value for money. Keizo Obuchi, the Japanese prime minister, got it right when he said this week that Mr Morita was “the engine that pulled the Japanese economy”.

At heart, the man who made Sony a worldwide name was a tinkerer. He retained a childlike curiosity in pulling things apart to see how they worked. Even back in the 1930s his wealthy parents had many of the trappings of western life: a car plus all the electrical appliances of the day. The teenage Akio spent hours dismantling the family record-player and rebuilding it. His other passions were physics and mathematics. In the second world war, while serving in the Japanese navy, he met a fellow enthusiast for technology, Masaru Ibuka. In 1946, the two started a telecommunications company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, with 20 employees, the precursor of Sony.

As things turned out, Mr Ibuka looked after research and product development while Mr Morita went out to raise the money and sell the goods. Mr Morita's great early coup was to persuade America's giant Western Electric to license its transistor know-how to his tiny firm (a move that infuriated Japan's powerful trade ministry, which was by-passed). After his chastening experience in Dusseldorf, Mr Morita journeyed on to Eindhoven in the Netherlands where the great Dutch electrical group, Philips, had its headquarters. Here was a company in a small country that had created a global brand. “If Philips can do it,” he wrote home to Mr Ibuka, “perhaps we can also manage.”

A star is born

Clearly, the tongue-twister, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, had to go. Mr Morita combined the Latin word for sound, sonus, with the English expression “sonny-boy” to give an impression of a company that was full of energy and youthful exuberance. Keeping things to essentials underlay many of Mr Morita's creative decisions. In the late 1970s he asked the engineers at Sony to build a miniature stereo sound system. People could listen to music while exercising, he said. The Walkman has become synonymous with Sony, and immensely profitable. Sony charges a hefty premium for the creative content its brand name implies.

There were disasters too. The Betamax video recorder was one. Though considered marginally better than the VHS recorder launched a year later in 1975 by the Japan Victor Company (both were based on an American design), the Sony version left little room for future improvement. Worse, Mr Morita upset manufacturers who wanted to make the Betamax recorder by driving too hard a bargain. The VHS design prospered and Mr Morita's Betamax lay dead in the water. A foray into Hollywood in 1989 also turned out to be an ill-judged, costly adventure. With that, the man who built up Sony as a global enterprise almost brought it to its knees.

Mr Morita gave the impression of being a contradiction. Those close to him speak of the two sides to his personality. There was the strict Japanese traditionalist, the eldest son of a 300-year-old sake-brewing family in Nagoya who disinherited his own eldest son, Hideo Morita, for marrying without his consent. To the outside world he was a jovial, talkative and incandescent personality who illuminated a room and fired imaginations. It was an act Mr Morita worked hard to perfect. With his tanned skin from skiing and tennis, bluish eyes, rare among Japanese, and mane of white hair parted in the middle, he looked the dandy. Hideo Morita called his father a “consummate performer” whom no one outside the inner family ever saw unmasked. “He had to act as the most international-understanding businessman in Japan,” was how the son described him to John Nathan for his book, “Sony: The Private Life”, published in September. Like Soichiro Honda and other entrepreneurs of his generation, Mr Morita embraced the outside world, America especially, because there was so little to be exploited in post-war Japan. The domestic market was sewn up by pre-war giants such as Toshiba, Hitachi, Mitsubishi and relative newcomers like Matsushita. But embracing the outside world did not mean that Mr Morita enjoyed it.

He had to subjugate his traditional sense of decorum; he had to learn not only to speak English but also to think English; he had to learn to say yes or no when the weight of a dozen generations of family tradition pressed him to be ambivalent. On occasion, he misread foreign sensitivities. He tried to prevent the English translation of a book, “A Japan That Can Say No”, of which he was co-author with a right-wing politician, Shintaro Ishihara, and subsequently distanced himself from it. Mr Morita's lifelong campaign to embed Sony in the hearts and minds of foreigners seems to have been a painful struggle. He bore the pain well.