by Akio Morita
I went to Professor Hattori and told him that while I appreciated the teaching job I could not continue because of this news. He went to the office to check, but was told there had been no formal advice from the Ministry of Education so they could not say what should be done. The school asked me to continue until the university received official notice, so I had to continue to lecture for a couple more months. I was eager to leave, but I felt obligated to continue helping my old mentor, Professor Hattori. I just couldn’t quit. When still no notification had come, I got a bold idea. I showed the newspaper article to the dean, Koroku Wada, and expressed my concern that if I continued to teach and it were discovered, the university might be punished or penalized for not “cleaning house” on its own. I said, “According to this I should be purged, but your office said I should continue nevertheless. I am afraid that if I continue you might be in trouble and I do not want to be responsible for it.” The dean considered this idea and finally said, “All right, you can stop teaching today.” And so my formal teaching career ended then. I said a fond goodbye to Professor Hattori and went happily to the new company.
Months went by without any notice that I had been officially purged from my university job, and every month the school would call to tell me to come and pick up my pay, because for some reason I remained on the payroll. And even though I wasn’t teaching, my salary increased every two or three months as adjustments were made for inflation. This went on until October of 1946, when the Ministry of Education finally got around to issuing my personal purge notice. I welcomed the subsidy while it lasted, because our new company was not setting any records for financial success in those days.
In August 1946, the Shirokiya department store was about to be renovated, and we were told there would be no room in it for us. We moved into other quarters for a while, in Kichijoji, one of the oldest sections of Tokyo, but they were not satisfactory. Finally, we settled down in a very cheap, dilapidated wooden shack on Gotenyama, a hill once famous for the beauty of its cherry trees in bloom, in Shinagawa near the southern edge of the city. Gotenyama had been fortified as part of the defenses of Tokyo Bay in 1853, but when we moved into our weatherbeaten old building on a cold day in January 1947, Gotenyama looked anything but fortified; the evidence of defeat was all around us. We could see bomb damage wherever we looked. There were leaks in the roof and we literally had to open umbrellas over our desks sometimes. But although we were far from the center of the city, we could be more independent here and had more room than at the department store.
In order to get to the rooms where Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo was located, you had to duck under some clotheslines on which the neighbors sometimes had their children’s diapers drying in the breeze. When some of my relatives came to see me, they were so shocked by the shabby conditions that they thought I had become an anarchist and they said so to my mother. They could not understand how, if I was not a radical, I could choose to work in a place like that when I could have been in Nagoya, living as befitted my “station” as the son of the president of a long-established company.
II
During the search for a likely product to make, it was often suggested to Ibuka that we make a radio receiver —there was still a strong demand in Japan for radios, not just shortwave adapters—but Ibuka adamantly refused. His reasoning was that the major companies were likely to have a very fast recovery from the war and would make use of their own components in their own products first and sell parts to others later. Also, they would naturally keep their latest technology to themselves, trying to preserve their lead over their competitors as long as possible. Ibuka and I had often spoken of the concept of our new company as an innovator, a clever company that would make new high technology products in ingenious ways. Merely building radios was not our idea of the way to fulfill these ideals.
We took our own unscientific survey of Japan’s surviving households. We had already sold quite a few shortwave radio adapters to enhance the medium-wave radios that many Japanese had carefully preserved through the war, and now we realized that there were a lot of phonographs out there as well. New motors and magnetic pickups were impossible to get during the war, and so it became obvious that there was a market for these items to be used to repair and upgrade the old wartime and prewar phonographs. The new, popular American swing and jazz music was arriving on records, and people were hungry for it. The Americans had brought their music with them, and a process was started during the Occupation of informing Japan about the United States and how the American people lived. The Occupation authorities had taken over control of the broadcasting stations and the English language could now be taught in the schools again and used on the air after being banned during the war years. Ideas of democracy and individual freedom and egalitarianism were being planted on very fertile soil after so many years of thought control and military dictatorship.
During the Occupation, everything was in short supply and the black market was the place everyone had to shop. Our new company—we formally incorporated Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo on May 7, 1946—managed to buy a small, very-much-used Datsun truck for the equivalent of about one hundred dollars. As it turned out, Ibuka and I, the two top officers of the company, were the only members who had driver’s licenses, so we had to make the deliveries and go out and do the shopping and bring supplies and materials to the factory. We would do our “executive” work, help load the delivery goods in the truck, crank it to get it started, and make the deliveries or run the errands.
The street scene in Tokyo was chaotic, noisy, smoky, and smelly. Gasoline was very scarce and expensive, when you could find it. Many of the cars, trucks, and buses had been modified to run on waste oil, charcoal, or other solids that were burnable, including garbage and coal dust. They were still running after the war. Even an occasional donkey cart appeared in the streets. We always managed to get gasoline for our truck through legitimate and other means. But so many American soldiers were selling gasoline, siphoning it out of their jeeps and trucks and some actually selling it by the barrel, that the military authorities tried to stop it by putting a red dye in it. Random roadblocks were set up. The police would stop the traffic and an MP would put a long glass tube into your gas tank, stopper it with his finger, pull it out, and check the color. If it was red you had a lot of explaining to do. But they soon began to catch fewer and fewer people because some clever Japanese had discovered that you could filter out the pink color with charcoal and was doing a thriving business “legitimizing” black market gasoline.
We knew that the big electric companies were not interested in the replacement parts business; they were making and selling new phonographs. And while the parts business was certainly not the idealistic, high technology endeavor we were working toward, Ibuka knew what he was doing. The new motors and pickups we made were as good as people could get in those days, and they kept the company afloat financially. Money was very tight, and stringent controls against inflation created problems for us, because they froze a large part of the money in circulation. The authorities put limits on how much money an individual or a company could withdraw from the bank. This was the original reason for putting everybody to work making heating pads—to sell some things directly to the public to raise cash.
But Ibuka had his mind set on producing a completely new consumer product—not just an upgrading of what had been on the prewar market, but something entirely new for Japan, a wire recorder. We had seen examples of wire recorders made in Germany, and research was being done on special steel wire for these machines at Tohoku University in northern Japan. The researchers had already developed excellent new technology for magnetic steel in their laboratories.
Ibuka learned that Sumitomo Metals Corporation was capable of producing the kind of steel wire needed, a special wire with a diameter of exactly one-tenth of a millimeter, something very difficult to make. Ibuka made a trip to Osaka to talk with Sumitomo about producing wire for the new recorder, but the company was not interested in his ord
er. He represented a small, new company asking for a very high-tech product that was expensive to produce and for which there would be only one customer. Other companies that had the capability to make the wire had the same reaction. But as it sometimes happens, the refusal turned out to be a blessing in disguise. We weren’t able to make a wire recorder, which was a disappointment. But the bright side was that there was a recorder in our future, a much better product, the tape recorder, although we didn’t know it at the time.
The Occupation forces had taken over the Japan Broadcasting Company, NHK, Japan’s version of the BBC, and they needed new technical equipment such as mixing units and other studio and broadcasting equipment, with which Ibuka was familiar. Ibuka submitted a bid on a contract to build a large broadcast mixing unit for NHK, and the American officer in charge, a brigadier general, came around to our shack in Go-tenyama to look over this unknown factory and its management and to discuss the specifications. Ibuka’s friend Shigeo Shima was in charge of engineering reconstruction of war damage at NHK, and Shima had recommended that Ibuka get the contract. Shima came with the general on his inspection trip, but when the general saw our shop he was taken aback by how primitive it was, and he shook his head. He could not understand why the man from NHK was recommending this tiny, unknown company working in such primitive conditions. Ibuka’s friend could only ask the general to trust his judgment, and the officer was finally persuaded to go along with the recommendation, but he was so concerned about our terrible building that he recommended we keep buckets of sand and water around the place in case of fire.
When the equipment was delivered to the NHK headquarters, then located only about a half mile from General MacArthur’s headquarters in downtown Tokyo, everyone marveled at its quality, especially the skeptical officer, who was still puzzled by the fact that a small, new company in a makeshift factory could produce such a high-technology product. There were congratulations and smiles all around, and the general was very pleased. I think we were able to obtain further jobs from the American Forces Radio Service and the Far East Air Force because of the breakthrough in trust we made on that first job by demonstrating our quality.
While Ibuka was at NHK delivering the mixing unit and accepting congratulations, he spotted an American-made Wilcox-Gay tape recorder in one of the offices, the first tape recorder he had laid eyes on. After a brief examination of it, he made a decision. The wire recorder he had been trying to build couldn’t match this tape recorder. There were some obvious drawbacks to a wire recorder, wonderful as the concept was. For one thing, in order to get decent fidelity, the wire had to pass over the recording and playback heads at a very fast speed, which meant you had to have a lot of wire on large spools. You could only store a limited amount of wire on the spools—or else you had to have too-thin wire, or enormous spools. Worse, it was not possible to edit the wire recording simply. Whatever you recorded on it had to be perfect. If you wanted to change a part of something that was already recorded on the wire, you would have to rerecord it in perfect synchronization with what was already on the wire, something very difficult to do.
But it was obvious from just a glance at the new machine that tape was much easier to work with. Unlike the wire, tape could be spliced easily and simply, so that changes could be recorded separately and inserted wherever they were needed. You could get a lot of tape on a reasonably small spool. Best of all, the fidelity of the tape recordings was better than wire recorders could produce. We had read something about tape recording, which was invented in Germany. In fact, during the war the Germans were using tape for running many of their propaganda programs—they went on for hours and hours. Ampex in the United States was among the earliest companies in the hardware end of this new business right after the war, and the major tape producer was Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, now called 3M Company. The technology was growing and improving. This kind of machine, not a wire recorder, was what Ibuka now wanted our company to produce.
By this time, Ibuka had talked about so many different products as possibilities that his colleagues, and especially the accountant, were getting weary, and Ibuka knew he had a growing credibility problem. He was determined to build a new tape recorder for Japan, and he had to convince his colleagues and our tightfisted comptroller that this was a viable idea. Ibuka talked to the American officer at NHK and asked permission to borrow the tape recorder for just a little while to show to his fellow workers. The officer was reluctant but finally agreed to bring the tape recorder to the company himself to demonstrate it. Everybody crowded around for the demonstration, and when it was over everybody was convinced that this would be a good project for the company to work on. Everybody, that is, except our accountant, Junichi Hasegawa, a man my father had sent to us from the family business to help us keep our little company financially sound.
Hasegawa and Shuzaburo Tachikawa, our company’s general affairs manager, had both cast a cold and critical eye on everything we were doing and thought this new idea would be too expensive and held little promise. They did not think we should allocate money to do R&D on the project. Ibuka and I were so excited by the new concept of the tape recorder and so convinced it was right for us that we decided to gang up on Hasegawa and make him see the light. We invited him to dinner at a black market restaurant, where we had a magnificent feast complete with beer, which was a rare commodity then. We ate and drank long into the night. We told him all about the virtues of the tape recorder and how it would revolutionize an industry and how we could get in on this new field early, that we could beat all the slow-moving competition of the giant companies if we started immediately, but that we would have to be clever and fast on our feet. We must have done a terrific selling job on him because he approved our project on a full stomach right then and there and we were on our way.
Or so we thought. We soon realized that the main trouble we had was that we didn’t know anything about how to make the crucial part of the system, the recording tape. Tape was the heart of the new project and the tape was a mystery to us. From our early work on wire recorders, we were pretty confident about building the mechanical and electronic components for a tape recorder. But the tape itself was a different problem. No one in Japan had any experience with magnetic recording tape, and there were no imports available to us, so we knew we would have to make our own tape. Our strategy from the beginning was not only to build a machine, but also to make and sell the recording tape, because we knew there would be a continuing market for tape from our customers who bought recorders. If we sold tape recorders and not tape, we would be handing good business to our eventual competitors.
Our first and most difficult problem was to get or produce the base material. We had no plastic. We had only cellophane, which we knew was inadequate, but we had to use what was on hand. Ibuka and I and a brilliant young engineer, Nobutoshi Kihara, worked as a team, cutting cellophane into long quarter-inch-wide strips and coating it with various experimental materials. It was soon obvious to us that this would not work because even the best and strongest grade of cellophane could only take one or two passes through the recording mechanism before it was stretched hopelessly out of shape, which distorted the sound. We hired chemists to figure out how to toughen cellophane, but that didn’t work either. We tried thicker cellophane. No luck. Finally, I asked a cousin of mine, Goro Kodera, who worked for Honshu Paper Company, if he thought it would be possible to produce a very strong, very thin, and very smooth kraft paper that we might be able to use as a base for our tape. He said he thought it was worth a try, and in a little while he supplied us with some good quality paper and we went to work with our razor blades again.
Finding good magnetic material to coat our tape with was almost impossible in that time of shortages. It seems incredible even to me now, but Ibuka, Kihara, and I made those first tapes by hand. We would cut enough tape for a small reel and then we would lay out the long strip on the floor of our laboratory. Our first attempts to get a magnetic material
were failures; the material was not right because the magnets we ground into powder were too powerful. We needed only a weak magnetic material for our tape. Kihara’s research led him to oxalic ferrite, which becomes ferric oxide when burned. That was it! But where to get it? I grabbed Kihara and we went to the pharmaceutical wholesalers’ district of Tokyo, and there, sure enough, we found the only store that handled the stuff. We bought two bottles of it and brought it back to the lab. We had no electric furnace to heat the chemical, so we borrowed a frying pan and, stirring the stuff with a wooden spoon, we cooked it until it turned brown and black; the brown stuff was ferric oxide and the black was ferrous tetraoxide. Kihara had the knack for checking the color of the powder and removing it from the frying pan at just the right color. We mixed this with a clear Japanese lacquer to get just the right consistency so we could airbrush it onto the strip. The airbrush technique didn’t work, so we tried everything we could think of and ended up painting the coating on by hand with fine brushes made of the soft bristles from a raccoon’s belly. To our surprise, we found this gave us the best results.
