The story of Sony is really the story of post-war Japan. When Sony’s co-founder Akio Morita died in 1999, Japanese prime minister Keizo Obuchi described him as “the engine that pulled the Japanese economy (along).” At the end of the Second World War, just five decades earlier, that same economy was in total shambles. By the time Morita passed away, Japan had grown to the second largest economy in the world.
What Obuchi was saying was that of the post-war economic growth of an entire nation — the most famous, most innovative bits could be attributed to a single individual — a private businessman who had no official appointments during his lifetime. Morita’s legacy was very much the business that he built: the company we know today as Sony.
Today, Sony is a massive conglomerate. It dabbles in movies, music, games, electronics, and even insurance! But it had a ridiculously humble origin: it was started in an abandoned building in war-torn Tokyo, in 1946. Its first product was a failed rice cooker. Its founding context was a defeated nation at the end of a brutal world war. And yet it changed the world. This is the story of how Sony became Sony.
When the Second World War ended, Japanese engineer (and soon-to-be Sony cofounder) Masaru Ibuka was running a factory that made mechanical components. These components controlled the frequency of radar devices, which explained the factory’s viability during the war period. But Ibuka was restless. He had a creative, curious mind and soon grew dissatisfied with producing boring components in large quantities. So, Ibuka left the company to start a new one — the Tokyo Telecommunications Research Laboratories.
Ibuka started his company on the third floor of an old, bare building in the heart of bomb-torn Tokyo. He had seven employees who had followed him from his previous business, and together they sat in this empty space, discussing what their new company could make. Ever the visionary, Ibuka wanted to build something ‘new’. However, he also knew that the young business needed to establish a financial base first. At this point, the company’s only source of capital was Ibuka’s personal resources. He was keeping the new business afloat with the small sum of money he was earning through the sale of voltmeters by his old company.
After toying with the idea of opening miniature golf courses or making sweet bean paste cakes, the group settled on making a rice cooker. The device was a wooden pot with spiral shaped electrodes on the bottom. It was simple enough to make, but the team could not get the cooker to work consistently. Even after multiple iterations, it still produced rice that was either overcooked or undercooked. Left with a bitter taste in their mouths (literally!), the employees of the struggling company desperately needed cash. So as a stopgap measure, they started making and selling heating pads. These pads were essentially w ...
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