by Akio Morita
I will never forget the fantastic sound that came from the new electric machine—in comparison, of course, to the old mechanical machine. It was a completely different sound, and I was absolutely astounded. The first record we received after the new machine arrived was Ravel’s “Bolero.” I liked the “Bolero” because it conveyed pathos to me, and hearing it with this new, more realistic sound bowled me over. I listened to our records over and over again—Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms—full of excitement and wonder that an electrical device like the vacuum tube could take the same old scratchy, hissing records we knew so well and make them sound so marvelous.
I was obsessed with this new discovery and all the questions it raised in my mind. I had a relative who was an engineer, and when I heard that he had built an electric phonograph by himself I was eager to see it. I went to his house and he demonstrated it to me. It was in components, all wired together and strung out on the straw mat floor of his house. It seemed marvelous that things like this could be built by amateurs, not only by big factories. In fact, making radios was becoming a popular hobby, and some newspapers and magazines would run columns with diagrams and parts lists and instructions to show their readers how to do it. This was something I had to do.
I began to buy books about electronics, and I subscribed to Japanese and foreign magazines that contained all the latest information about sound reproduction and radio. Soon I was spending so much time on electronics that it was hurting my schoolwork. I was devoting nearly all my after-school hours to my new hobby, making electric devices from the diagrams in a Japanese magazine called Wireless Experiments.
My dream was to build an electric phonograph and make a recording of my own voice. I kept expanding my experiments as I learned more and more about the new technology. I had to teach myself because the subjects I was really interested in were not taught in my school in those days. But I managed to build a crude electric phonograph and a radio receiver on my own. I even made a crude recording of my voice and played it back on my electric phonograph.
In fact, I became so engrossed in my electronic tinkering that I almost flunked out of school. My mother was called to the school often for conferences about my poor academic performance. The principal was concerned and annoyed by my lack of interest in conventional studies. I remember that we used to be assigned desks in class according to our grades. There were two hundred and fifty in our class, divided into five groups of fifty each. The top student of each group was the head boy, and the seats were assigned from the back of the room in descending order of achievement. Although the class rankings changed every year, I was always seated up front under the eye of the teacher, with the slow learners.
I don’t want to be too tough on myself here, so I will admit that I was good at mathematics, physics, and chemistry. But I would always get below-average grades in geography, history, and Japanese. I used to be called to the principal’s office to be talked to about my uneven work. When it would get really bad, my parents would scold me and order me to put away my electronic toys. I would obey until my grades began to look a little better, and then I would go back to the things I liked best.
II
When I was in middle school, I read about magnetic recording for the first time in Wireless and Experiments. Up to then few people in Japan even had electric phonographs, which played poorly made records of shellac or aluminum with steel needles that gave bad sound and wore out the records fast. But then NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Company, imported a German steel-belt recorder. This machine was a brand-new design. It used a metal ribbon or belt as the recording medium, and it gave much better fidelity than the electric machines like our new Victor.
About that same time, it was announced that Dr. Kenzo Nagai of Tohoku University had produced a wire recorder. I was fascinated by the idea of recording my own voice and decided to build a wire recorder myself. I knew virtually nothing, but I had the reckless enthusiasm of the young, and so I went out and bought some piano wire and went to work. The first challenge, at least the most critical challenge, was to design and make a recording head. I worked for a whole year at it, trying one thing after another, but every attempt failed. I later learned why I failed: the head gap, the point where the sound is transferred to the wire in the form of an electronic signal, was too wide and so the signal just dissipated. I knew nothing of the importance of a bias current, which Dr. Nagai had perfected, or how to generate it. The books and magazines I had access to in those days had not explained it to me, and my own knowledge was primitive. And so, without knowing more than some basic principles and simple, practical methods, I struggled along. I was disappointed by my failures, and frustrated, but they did not discourage me.
When I entered the final year of middle school, I told my parents and teachers that I would take the science department examinations for the Eighth Higher School—in Japan in those days our school curriculum was very advanced, and higher school included what in the United States would be the first two years of college. My decision surprised them all, because even though my grades in the sciences and math were good, my overall grades were pretty terrible, and they reminded me that to get into the science department I would have to pass some tough examinations on subjects I had neglected. I knew it, but I was determined. And so I became a ronin. In ancient times a samurai who did not have a master or who had lost his fief was called a ronin, and a student who got off the track and had to spend time studying on his own for his next examinations after graduation is referred to this way even today. For one year I buckled down and studied harder than I had ever studied. I had private tutors to help me with English, advanced mathematics, and the Japanese and Chinese classics. I didn’t do anything else that whole year but study. And I made it.
I’d like to say that because of my intense efforts that year I moved to the head of the class, but I can’t. However, I earned another distinction: I became the lowest-ranking graduate of my school ever to be admitted to the science department of the Eighth Higher School. No student who had ranked one hundred and eightieth in his class as I did had ever been admitted to the science department before, but I made it because of my successful year of study and my determination. I have always been determined.
High school was not a snap, of course, and I discovered that even the science department curriculum was full of dull and uninteresting subjects—minerals and botany and other things I wasn’t interested in—and I found myself in danger of failing for a time, but in my third year, when we are able to specialize, I chose physics, where I always got straight A’s. I was in love with physics and I idolized my instructors.
But despite my optimism and enthusiasm, the year was 1940 and the future could not have looked bleaker. The world was in turmoil. In Europe France had surrendered to the German armies, England was being attacked by Luftwaffe bombers, and Winston Churchill was telling his people that they had nothing to look forward to but “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” Japan was on the road to disaster, although the news at home was reported favorably and censorship was in force. As students we didn’t think much about global issues, or even domestic politics, but the military men who controlled the nation had announced a mobilization law in 1938, and about the time I began my college studies Japan dominated the map of Asia. At home all the old political parties were dissolved. Under the economic squeeze of the U.S. and the Allied powers, and the threat of a cutoff of the nation’s raw materials and oil, the decision was being made to go to war with the United States, if necessary, for Japan’s survival and its continued control of the nations it had forced into the so-called Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere. Important history was being made, but at the time I was interested only in physics.
One of my favorite teachers in high school, Gakujun Hattori, was very kind to me and was a big influence in my life. I was good at physics and Professor Hattori, who watched my progress with great satisfaction, knew my heart was set on continuing in the same field beyond higher school. When it was time for
me to start thinking about university, I discussed the situation with him. I knew that the faculty at Osaka Imperial University’s physics department included such famous researchers as Hidetsugu Yagi, who invented the Yagi antenna, which was so important in the development of modern radar. The department also had Professor K. Okabe, the inventor of the magnetron, the device that first made it possible to generate microwave frequency power.
One day Professor Hattori said to me, “Morita, a classmate of mine from Tokyo University is also teaching at Osaka now, a man named Tsunesaburo Asada. He is the most outstanding scientist in the field of applied physics. If that’s what you want to study, Professor Asada is the man you should meet. Why don’t you go see him during your summer holidays? I can arrange it for you.” I jumped at the chance, and on my next vacation I went straight to Osaka and looked up Professor Asada.
I liked him the minute I walked into his cluttered office. The professor was a short, rotund fellow with a twinkle in his eye who spoke with the hard, nasal accents of Osaka. It was obvious that he liked to tell and to hear a joke, and although he was a master he did not play the role of the stern or pompous professor. He was a rarity in Japan, where teachers were accorded a great deal of respect, almost reverence, and generally seemed to take their exalted position seriously. Professor Asada didn’t seem at all interested in the trappings of status. We hit it off right from the start. It was meeting this marvelous man that made me decide that Osaka was where I would study rather than the more famous Tokyo or Kyoto universities. Both Tokyo and Kyoto had good physics departments and were staffed with nationally known, but more doctrinaire or older, professors. At least I thought so at the time.
Professor Asada showed me around his laboratory and we talked quite a lot that day. He gave me a kind of oral examination—he wanted to know what I knew, what experiments I had done, what I had constructed, and what I was interested in. Then he told me about what kind of work was going on in his lab and that clinched it for me. Professor Asada was very serious about applied science, and among the things he was working on was light beam telephone transmission, using high pressure mercury lamps. He could demonstrate how very high intensity light beams could be modulated by audio frequency. I wanted to study with this brilliant, confident, and surprisingly relaxed and jovial scientist.
In the field of modern physics, Osaka Imperial University became the mecca for serious students and experimenters. It was the newest science department of any Japanese university, and therefore it had the most modern facilities. Also, since the university was new, many of the professors and instructors were younger people and not hidebound or wedded to old-fashioned ideas.
My father was disappointed that I did not choose to go into economics but chose science for my college career. From his point of view, even if I had gone into the science department I might have studied agricultural chemistry, which would have given me some courses relevant to the brewing industry, but I was pursuing instead the most basic of the sciences, physics. I wanted to know why things worked. He did not try to change my mind, but I am sure he still expected me to assume my role in the family business when the time came. He believed that physics would eventually be only a hobby for me and I sometimes feared that that’s what would happen.
But, of course, when I entered university we were at war, and Professor Asada’s laboratory had been pressed into service as a naval research facility. I continued to experiment, but I skipped as many lectures as possible in order to get more lab time. I felt that most of the professors were boring as lecturers, and since they had all written books and papers I could always find out what they had to say by reading them. Because I was missing the lectures, I was able to spend more time in the lab than the other students. Professor Asada helped me more and more, and before long, I was able to help him in some small jobs for the navy, mainly electronics, which was closer to true physics than working with the old electrical circuits or the electromechanical ones.
At the university, Professor Asada was regarded as the expert in applied physics, and newspapers would often ask him to answer questions about science for them. Eventually he began to write a short weekly column elaborating on the latest developments in research and technology, at least those that were not secret. Readers of the newspaper would write to him to get his opinion of their scientific ideas. The column became quite lively and popular.
I often helped Professor Asada with his research, and occasionally when he was too busy I would write the column. I remember that in one of these columns I discussed the theory of atomic energy and I expressed the idea that, as I wrote it, “if atomic energy were treated appropriately, an extremely powerful weapon could be made.” The idea of atomic energy or an atomic weapon seemed remote at the time. There were two cyclotrons in Japan, and progress toward creating an atomic reaction was being made very slowly. Japanese technology, then, to the best of my knowledge, would only permit the separation of a few milligrams of U-235 a day, and at that rate, I calculated that to accumulate enough to make a bomb would require twenty years. Of course, I did not know how far the scientific community in the United States and in Germany had come. And nobody in Japan knew about the Manhattan Project.
Some of Dr. Asada’s work was research for the Imperial Japanese Navy, and I helped him with it. In doing so I came in contact with several naval officers from the Aviation Technology Center, which was located at Yokosuka, near Yokohama. I was nearing graduation and had not yet been drafted when one day an officer told me that physics graduates could apply for a short-term commission and become technical officers just by passing an examination. I wasn’t too keen on the idea of becoming a naval officer at all, although I thought it might be wiser to volunteer and pick my assignment than be drafted into the army or navy and have no choice. Another officer, a captain, came to the lab one day and told me there was another possibility. The navy then had a program for assigning enlistees to universities. A second-year student could apply for a commission, and once accepted he would become an employee of the navy for life. That latter part in itself seemed very worrisome—I did not want to become a career naval officer—but I developed an interest in it quickly when he described the alternative. He said short-term commissioned officers with physics backgrounds were being assigned to ships of the line to operate the new radar sets that were coming into use then, and that meant war zone assignment and probably the end of my studies, if not my life. So the choice was to be drafted eventually and face a very uncertain assignment, to apply for a short term commission and go to sea, or to sign up with the navy permanently and continue my studies.
He recommended that I take the test for a permanent navy position with a scholarship, so I could continue my work right there in the lab and get my degree. He said he didn’t want to see dedicated researchers like me being sent to sea. It was his thought that after being accepted into the program I would only have to undergo basic training and then I could rejoin the research center. “That’s the safest way for you,” he told me. “You can keep up your research and we can continue to use you.”
I didn’t have to think it over too long. I decided that the lifetime service idea was preferable at the time— nobody knew what was going to happen—and so I took the examination and passed it. The navy gave me thirty yen a month and a gold-colored anchor insignia to wear on my collar. With that I became a navy man assigned to the university and my job was to continue to study physics. But this did not last long. In my third year the war intensified, and we physics students were put under direct military control like everyone else in the country; I was assigned to the Office of Aviation Technology at Yokosuka in early 1945.
But it wasn’t what I expected. They billeted me in a workers’ dormitory, and the first morning, instead of going into a laboratory as I anticipated, I was marched with the rest of the drafted workers into a factory. Somebody handed me a metal file and assigned me to the machine shop. Every day I would slave away in that shop, filing steel parts. After a few days,
I began to think that if I didn’t get out of there soon I would go crazy. All over Japan students were taken out of school and workers were taken off nonessential jobs to do war work, and now university science students seemed to be no exception.
Yoshiko Kamei, the woman who was to be my wife, was also assigned from her college classroom to a factory where she made wooden parts for the wings of a training aircraft called Red Dragonfly. She still knows how to use carpentry tools because of that work. When the airplane parts factory was bombed, she was assigned to a plant where they made hospital gowns for wounded soldiers, and later she was transferred to a printing shop where military scrip was printed for use in the occupied areas of Asia. Most schools could only hold one day of classes a week in the latter stages of the war, and some held no classes at all. There were few young men at home to do these jobs because Japan’s military manpower was spread far and thin. Yoshiko and I did not meet until 1951 and we were married that year.
After several weeks of this factory drudgery, someone must have realized I was improperly assigned, because I was suddenly and without explanation transferred to the optics laboratory and I began to feel that I was getting back to the working world I knew best. There were officers there and workers who were graduates of photography schools, but I was the only university student majoring in physics, so they saved all the difficult technical problems for me to study. My first assignment was to try to find out how to prevent the damage to aerial photographs caused by jagged streaks of static electricity generated in the dry atmosphere at altitude. I needed access to a good library to research this job, and so I conceived a plan. Pretending that I had come directly from the navy, I called on a very famous professor at the Physics and Chemistry Research Institute in Tokyo, Professor Jiro Tsuji, to get his permission to use the institute’s research library. He kindly offered me full assistance.
