by Akio Morita
Then I made application with my unit to go to Tokyo every day to do my research. I must have been very convincing, because I got permission almost immediately. But commuting on slow, crowded wartime trains from Yokohama to Tokyo, which took well over an hour, became very tiresome, so I moved into the home of a close friend and classmate from primary school who had been a law student at Tokyo University when he was drafted into the navy. On weekdays I would go to the research institute, and on Saturdays I would return to the workers’ dormitory and spend the weekend with my fellow workers. I was learning how to be a military wheeler-dealer.
But I wasn’t shirking work. I was trying to figure out how to prevent those static electric streaks. I knew that when aerial pictures were taken by mapping cameras, which used very big spools of film, sparks were often caused by static electricity, which would ruin the picture. I began to get some ideas through my reading and experimenting. I moved into the darkroom, where plenty of film was available, and tried to simulate the sparks in the lab. I used various voltages across the camera parts and the film, and I switched polarity. In a short time I managed to come close to duplicating the phenomenon in the lab. In my first report I said that, although I had managed to simulate the phenomenon to a certain extent, I still had to find out precisely what caused it and how to remedy it, but I could not carry on with this experiment because the optics division did not have the proper facilities. Of course, the most suitable place with the best equipment was the laboratory of Professor Asada, and I asked to be assigned under temporary orders to the Asada lab.
I thought I would make it easier for my superiors to make the decision, so I told them that I didn’t need any travel expenses, and since the lab was in my old university I knew where I could stay free of charge. All I would need from them was permission to study in the lab. Their only investment would be a large quantity of film, since film in those days was very scarce and I could not get it anywhere else. What their approval would mean for me, I hoped, would be the possibility of completing this assignment with the more advanced equipment at the university lab. And, as I hoped, I not only completed it but was able to use my formal research report to the navy as my senior thesis.
They saw it my way, authorizing a load of film, which I packed into my rucksack before I returned to my university. So for a few months, while others were being given a hard time, I was staying at the old apartment my family had rented for me as a student, getting valuable advice from Professor Asada, and merely sending in a report on my research every week. It was the opportunity to do original work at my own pace that I liked, and of course I continued to learn from Professor Asada.
Forty years later, in 1985, I attended a reunion of the staff of the optics lab and I gave a speech confessing my motive for leaving. I said I had done a very selfish thing and apologized for any inconvenience my selfishness may have caused the other members of the lab. They all applauded, and then my former superior officer got up and said he also had a confession to make. He said the day I left for Osaka with my load of film and my freedom he reported to his superior officer, an admiral: “The admiral was furious! He scolded me severely and said that there was absolutely no precedent for what I had done.” This dressing down went on for two hours, and my boss was dismissed with an order to go to Osaka and bring back Morita. The next morning he appeared before the admiral to announce his departure to bring me back when the admiral waved his hand impatiently and told him to forget it. And so I was allowed to remain in Osaka. But for forty years I was unaware of the trouble I had caused, and now I felt I had to apologize for it doubly. We all got a good laugh out of it, in retrospect.
With my graduation from university, I automatically became a professional naval officer, and this meant that I had to undergo some actual military training, so I was shipped off to a marine corps base at Hamamatsu, not far from Nagoya, where I went through the usual four-month officer’s indoctrination and training course. I found it difficult, but proving myself physically was very rewarding.
At that time only students in the sciences, like me, could be exempted from the draft for a while. My brother Kazuaki, who was studying economics at Waseda University, could not qualify for a deferment and was drafted into the navy and given flight training in twin-engine bombers. And right after my graduation, when I was at the Hamamatsu base, he was at the navy’s Toyohashi Air Base, which is very close by, and he was flying over my barracks on training missions every day. He was fortunate to be assigned to the twin-engine night bombing unit because the training took a long time and the war was over before he graduated. Some of his school classmates were assigned to fighters, which was a much shorter training course, and some became kamikaze pilots who flew suicide missions and, of course, never returned.
My younger brother, Masaaki, was in middle school, and the military was encouraging youngsters to volunteer. Entire classes were joining up. Japan at the time was full of war fervor and although a young man might not want to volunteer he would be ostracized if he did not. And so Masaaki was only fourteen or fifteen years old when his entire class decided they would join the navy. My parents were shocked and didn’t want him to go, but he insisted, and I remember my mother’s tears when he left the house. I took him to the train and I cried too. He went into naval flight training, and fortunately he was in the early stages of his training when the war ended. All three brothers at one time or another found themselves flying in naval planes. In my experiments I went on many night flights as a passenger to test the equipment we were using in our attempts to make a heat-seeking weapon, and my colleagues taught me how to pilot a plane, unofficially, of course. For a while three brothers were flying in the air and my mother thought there was no hope that we would survive the war. Fortunately, all three of us made it through unharmed.
The war with the United States was a tragedy and to most Japanese a surprise and a shock, despite all the propaganda about the Western countries ganging up on Japan. As a child, of course, I was not aware of all the political events that were taking place in the twenties and early thirties, but by the time I was thirteen, in 1934, we were being given military drill about two hours a week. All through those years we were brought up to consider the Soviets the potential enemy and were told that there was a possibility of war with the Soviet Union. We were taught that Communism was dangerous and that the reason Japan went into Manchuria was to secure a border and a buffer zone against the Communists for the protection of Japan.
Hotheaded ultra-nationalists, fascists, and some junior military officers had created several serious incidents at home and abroad for Japan in those days, and people like my father were worried about the future. In 1932, a group of these ultra-nationalists, together with forty-two young officers, attacked the so-called privileged classes, killing finance minister Junnosuke Inoue and a leading businessman, Baron Takuma Dan, who headed the giant Mitsui group of companies. Later that year, on May 15, they assassinated Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai and attacked the home of the lord privy seal and also the offices of some of the giant holding companies. They also stormed the Nippon Bank and the Mitsubishi Bank.
People of our class were alarmed by these events. Although the rebels were aiming at the establishment of fascism, these events looked like parts of a Communist plot to many conservative people. Then, in 1936, the famous February 26 incident took place, when another band of army rebels occupied the prime minister’s official residence and the war office and assassinated former prime minister Makoto Saito, who was lord keeper of the privy seal, a general who was in charge of military education, and a former finance minister. They wounded the grand chamberlain and brought the wrath of the emperor down on themselves. Military force was used to subdue the rebels, and fifteen officers and several of their civilian helpers were later executed.
Although the revolt failed, it became more and more evident that the upper-class politicians and businessmen had been intimidated by the attacks. The nation was in poor economic condition and the yo
ung fascist officers, though they were misguided, managed to arouse the sympathy of many people. In Japan there is a tradition of sympathy for those who strike out against overwhelming odds, even if their idealism or zeal is misplaced. Many of Japan’s folk heroes are men who died trying to accomplish the impossible. From the middle thirties, the military increased its control over politics and the fascists began to dictate policy. In this atmosphere it was difficult for people to speak out. Even in the Diet, the Japanese parliament, few elected members had the courage to speak out against the militarists and those who did it once were not given a second chance to speak. And so the militarists took the upper hand.
Whenever my father and his friends would get together, they would talk of the dangers ahead. They were businessmen and they were more liberal in their thinking than the fascists, but they were unable to do anything but keep silent in public.
Young people in schools only knew what they were told, and at that time information was one-sided. The mission of the Japanese forces that invaded China was glamourized. Some people had heard rumors of the attacks on Chinese cities, of what was happening in Nanking, and I assume my father heard more than he said, but the younger people didn’t pay too much attention to such things. I knew that relations between the United States and Japan were getting worse, but I never expected war.
I had built a time clock, which was attached to my radio and was set to wake me up at six o’clock every morning. I remember very clearly the morning of December 8, 1941—it was still December 7 in the United States—when my timer turned on my radio and I heard the announcement that Japanese forces had attacked Pearl Harbor. I was shocked. Everyone in our house was stunned by this news, and I remember thinking that this was a dangerous thing. I had grown up believing the West was somewhat superior in technology. For example, at that time metal vacuum tubes could be bought only in America—we didn’t have any such thing in Japan. I had bought RCA tubes for my experiments. And knowing about America’s technology through movies and products such as cars and phonographs and from my uncle, I was concerned that a mistake had been made.
But in those weeks right after Pearl Harbor, our newspapers gave us a steady stream of good news of Japanese military victories—our forces sank the two British capital ships, Prince of Wales and Repulse, which were supposed to be invincible; they took the Philippines and Hong Kong, all in the month of December; and I began to think that perhaps we were stronger than I realized. Once the war started the general public, including my parents, believed that we had no alternative but to cooperate in the war effort. The newspapers were full of the news of the pressures the United States was putting on us, of the immigration laws that discriminated against Japanese, and the demands that we leave China and Manchuria, our buffer, we thought, against Communism. And that was the cry we all heard, that the Reds were a danger and threat to Japan and that only the fascists were going to protect us from them.
Everything the military-dominated government did was made to appear an order of the emperor, and they forced schoolchildren and adults alike to do incredible things. A school principal who made a mistake when he recited the Imperial Rescript on Education committed suicide to atone for it. Thought police and special police roamed the country arresting people on the slightest suspicion that they were not loyal or obedient enough or reverent enough. Conductors on the trolley cars that ran past the imperial palace grounds in Tokyo would announce the moment everybody was expected to bow. Schoolchildren bowed to the portable Shinto shrine that held the written words of the emperor. These were ways the military used to keep the nation in their power, and people like me and my parents went along. One might have dissent in his heart, and there were many who did, but it was difficult and dangerous to express it. Resisters were “reeducated” in special camps, and those who still resisted were thrown into the most menial jobs. All leftists and Communists were rounded up and jailed.
When my four-month period of military training was over, I received the rank of lieutenant and was ordered back to the optical division at Yokosuka. In short order, I was assigned to help supervise a special unit that had evacuated to the countryside to work on thermal guidance weapons and night-vision gunsights. We were to be based at a big old country house in Zushi, a small town south of Kamakura, looking out onto Sagami bay. Our unit was headed by a captain, and there were some other high-ranking officers, plus two or three lieutenants, like me, and a few ensigns. The senior lieutenant was the duty officer, a sort of general affairs manager. That was I. Aboard ship I would have been the deck officer. I had to handle all the details of our daily life, including providing food for the group, but I found the environment of the country house wonderful despite the responsibilities I had. The house was built on the Western style, faced with stucco, with a courtyard garden. Movie companies had used it frequently when they wanted a Western setting for a film. The house was built at the foot of a cliff just above the beach, and I took a room at the nearby Nagisa Hotel, which had also been taken over by the navy as an officers’ residence, and commuted to work in the morning by walking along the beach from the hotel to the house. It seemed incongruous because sometimes it was as peaceful as any beach resort, yet we were right under the return path of the B-29’s that were methodically hitting Tokyo and Kawasaki and Yokohama almost every day with incendiary bombs and high explosives.
Although I was very young, I had had plenty of management training at home already and I could take care of my entire group. There was a shortage of food in our unit, and we had to use our ingenuity to get enough to put on the table. A very clever ensign under me struck up a friendship with a fish shop owner from Zushi who used to show up on the beach frequently. As navy men we were entitled to a small sake ration and so we would exchange our sake, which was scarce, for a bit of fresh fish. But it still wasn’t enough for young people to eat, so I hit upon another idea. I sent a letter to my family by military mail asking them to send me a barrel of soy sauce and a barrel of soybean paste marked “For Naval Use.” At that time the Morita company was making dehydrated soy bean paste for the army—Japanese can do without almost anything but their soy bean soup—and alcohol products for the navy. This kind of shipment would not look unusual. Of course it was a naughty thing for me to do, but although I am sure it was a breach of regulations, we had to live by our wits in those days and I think I could have defended it successfully if I had been challenged. When the miso and the soy sauce arrived, we stored it in the basement, and whenever fish was available we would barter some of our precious hidden supply. That way our little unit stayed relatively well fed and happy under difficult circumstances.
I belonged to a special project group composed of researchers from the army, navy, and civilian sector, all working on heat-seeking devices. We were brainstorming the challenge, with the task of being original and audacious in our thinking. One of the civilian representatives in our group was a brilliant electronics engineer who was in charge of his own company in those days, a man who was destined to have a great deal of influence in my life. Masaru Ibuka is thirteen years my senior, but he was to become my very close friend, colleague, partner, and co-founder of the company we would create: the Sony Corporation.
Being part of this development group was quite heady stuff for me. I was young and cocky, but I was getting used to being in the company of superiors. We had all been thrown together on a project that was ahead of its time. Our small team spent days together, during which we got to know a great deal about each other, but we could not make much progress on the heat seeker. (The American Sidewinder missile, which is the sort of device we were trying to make, did not appear until many years after the war.) I was merely a recent university graduate, but in our joint meetings I found myself facing renowned professors and officers from the army who would lean across the table and demand, “What is the opinion of the navy on this point?” To which I had to reply, as seriously as I could, “Well, gentlemen, in the navy’s view… I was grateful for my father’s
training in those moments.
Mr. Ibuka’s contribution to this group was significant. He had devised a powerful amplifier at his company, the Japan Measuring Instrument Company, which was being used in a device that could detect a submarine thirty meters below the surface of the water by measuring any disturbance in the earth’s magnetic flux. The unit was suspended from an airplane, and its key part was Ibuka’s amplifier, which was powerful enough to detect and amplify a very small frequency of only one or two cycles per second to around six hundred cycles, where it could be noted. I have read that twenty-six enemy submarines were detected around Formosa with this device during its full-scale testing, but it was so late in’ the war that by the time the detector was ready to be deployed there weren’t enough planes available to carry them. Japan was losing control of the air as American forces kept moving closer to Japan’s main islands, with troops storming the island chain to the south and daily bombings destroying our aircraft factories.
As time went on the air raids became more frequent over Tokyo and all through the industrial and military area of Kawasaki and Yokohama, just north of our haven, which was on the Miura Peninsula. Whenever the raids began, the alarms would go off all around us, and although we were never bombed we were always alerted. It seemed to me that since we were at the bottom of the cliff it would be pretty difficult to be hit by a bomb, and besides, who would want to bomb us anyway? We were not an active military force, and I was sure the Americans didn’t even know we existed. That was not military thinking, but it was logical. I felt if we got hit by a bomb it would be an accident. So I called everyone together to hear what I had in mind.
