by Akio Morita
Miniaturization and compactness have always appealed to the Japanese. Our boxes have been made to nest; our fans fold; our art rolls into neat scrolls; screens that can artistically depict an entire city can be folded and tucked neatly away, or set up to delight, entertain, and educate, or merely to divide a room. And we set as our goal a radio small enough to fit into a shirt pocket. Not just portable, I said, but “pocket-able.” Even before the war RCA made a medium-size portable using tiny “peanut” vacuum tubes, but half the space was taken up by an expensive battery, which played for only about four hours. Transistors might be able to solve that power and size problem.
We were all eager to get to work on the transistor, and when word came that it would be possible to license the technology, I went to New York to finalize the deal in 1953. I also wanted to see what the world was like and where our new company could fit in, so I planned to visit Europe after my New York business was concluded. I was excited when I climbed aboard the Stratocruiser at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, a small suitcase in one hand and a bag slung over my shoulder.
I must admit now that I was initially discouraged by the very scale of the United States. Everything was so big, the distances were so great, the open spaces so vast, the regions so different. I thought it would be impossible to sell our products here. The place just overwhelmed me. The economy was booming, and the country seemed to have everything.
When I mailed Ibuka the license agreement with Western Electric, I had a surge of confidence. But in Japan exchange control was very strong at the time, and we needed approval from the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to remit the initial transistor license fee of twenty-five thousand dollars out of the country. The transistor was so new, and foreign currency was so scarce in Japan, which was just then beginning to accelerate its recovery from the war, that the bureaucrats at MITI could not see the use for such a device and were not eager to grant permission. Besides, MITI thought that such a small company as Totsuko (as we were known) could not possibly undertake the enormous task of dealing with brand-new technologies. In fact, they were adamant against it at first. Ibuka was eloquent on the possible uses of this little-known device, but it took him six months to convince the bureaucrats. MITI has not been the great benefactor of the Japanese electronics industry that some critics seem to think it has.
While MITI was considering our request, I was traveling. I flew to Europe, where I visited many companies and factories and began to feel a little better about the future of our company and of Japan. I visited Volkswagen, Mercedes, and Siemens, and many smaller companies, some of which have disappeared in the years since then. And of course in the electronics field I wanted to visit Philips in Holland, an electronics company that was famous worldwide. It was my visit to Philips that gave me courage and a new insight.
I was a bit depressed when I left Germany. Conditions were improving very rapidly there despite the devastation Germany had also suffered in the war, and it made Japan’s postwar progress seem slow. One day I ordered some ice cream in a restaurant on Koenigs-strasse in Dusseldorf, and the waiter served it with a miniature paper parasol stuck into it as a decoration. “This is from your country,” he said, smiling and, I suppose, meaning it as a compliment. That was the extent of his knowledge of Japan and its capabilities, I thought, and maybe he was typical. What a long way we had to go.
I took the train from Dusseldorf to Eindhoven, and when I crossed the border from Germany to Holland I found a great difference. Germany, even so soon after the war, was becoming highly mechanized—Volkswagen was already producing seven hundred cars a day—and everybody seemed to be rebuilding and producing goods and new products very rapidly. But in Holland many people were riding bicycles. This was a purely agricultural country and a small one at that. You could see old-fashioned windmills everywhere, just as in old Dutch landscape paintings. Everything seemed so quaint. When I finally arrived at Eindhoven, I was surprised to see what a huge company Philips was, although I knew Philips was very successful with their electrical products in Southeast Asia and around the world. I don’t know what I expected, but it was a surprise to find the great N. V. Philips enterprise of my imagination situated in a small town in a small corner of a small agricultural country.
I stared at the statue of Dr. Philips in front of the train station, and I thought of our own village of Kosugaya and the similar bronze statue of my father’s great-grandfather that once stood there. I wandered around the town thinking about Dr. Philips, and when I visited the factory I was all the more taken with the thought that a man born in such a small, out-of-the-way place in an agricultural country could build such a huge, highly technical company with a fine worldwide reputation. Maybe, I thought, we could do the same thing in Japan. It was quite a dream, but I remember writing Ibuka a letter from Holland saying, “If Philips can do it, maybe we can, too.” I spoke very little English in those days, and I just visited these factories as a tourist. I took no VIP tour, and I met none of the executives of the companies. I represented an unknown company then, but in the next four decades Sony and Philips, two companies from small and seemingly isolated places, cooperated in design standards and in joint development that has led to many technological advances, from the standard compact audio cassette to the newest watershed development in home sound reproduction, the compact disc (digital audio disc), where we combined our strength in pulse code modulation research with Philips’s fine laser technology. There are still other joint developments in the R&D stage.
Soon after my return from Europe, the laborious work of creating a new type of transistor began in our research lab based on the Western Electric technology we had licensed. We had to raise the power of the transistor—otherwise, it could not be used in a radio. It was very complicated work, and our project team went through a long period of painstaking trial and error, using new, or at least different, materials to get the increased frequency we needed. They had to rebuild and virtually reinvent the transistor.
The early Bell Labs transistor used a slab of germanium to which indium was alloyed on each side. The germanium was the negative part and the indium was the positive. But we reasoned that since negative electrons move faster than positive ones, we could get higher frequency by reversing the polarity. That is, instead of a positive-negative-positive configuration, we would try to produce a negative-positive-negative one. We didn’t seem to have the right materials to do this. Indium had too low a melting point for our purposes, for example, so we discarded the old materials and began experiments using gallium and antimony, but this didn’t work well either. At one point everyone seemed stumped, and we thought of using phosphorus to replace antimony, but someone pointed out during one of our many brainstorming sessions that Bell Labs had already tried this and it hadn’t worked.
The head of our research laboratories, Makoto Kikuchi, a leading expert in the semiconductor field, recalls that in those days the level of research and engineering in the United States was so high that “the voice of Bell Labs was like the voice of God.’’ Nevertheless, one of our team kept trying what is called the phosphorus doping method, using more and more and more phosphorus in the process, and finally he thought he began to see results. He reported his findings at a meeting, cautiously. Nobody else was reporting any luck at all, and the head of the transistor development team, my late brother-in-law, Kazuo Iwama, who later become president of our company, was a scientist, and he knew the scientific mind. He said to the researcher, “Well, if it looks to you as though you are getting interesting results, why don’t you just keep working and see what happens?” The phosphorus method eventually worked, and expanding on it we developed the high-frequency device at which we were aiming.
A year later we surprised the Bell Labs people who had invented the transistor by reporting how we made transistors by phosphorus doping, something that had been tried and discarded, obviously prematurely, by them. And it was also during our transistor research and particularly the heavy use of p
hosphorus that our researcher, physicist Leo Esaki, and our staff discovered and described the diode tunneling effect, how subatomic particles can move in waves through a seemingly impenetrable barrier. Esaki was awarded a Nobel Prize for this work in 1973.
Now that we had the transistor, getting and making the miniature parts for our small radio was another challenge. We had to redesign everything ourselves, or almost everything. Ibuka somehow managed to find a small company in Tokyo that made tiny tuning condensers, and we put that company to work producing their products mainly for our use. The project moved slowly while we continued our tape recorder and other business. We had to refine the transistor, learn how to mass-produce it, and design it into new products.
V
I had decided during my first trip abroad in 1953 that our full name—Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha —was not a good name to put on a product. It was a tongue-twister. Even in Japan, we shortened it sometimes to Totsuko, but when I was in the United States I learned that nobody could pronounce either name. The English-language translation—Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company—was too clumsy. We tried Tokyo Teletech for a while, but then we learned there was an American company using the name Teletech.
It seemed to me that our company name didn’t have a chance of being recognized unless we came up with something ingenious. I also thought that whatever new name we came up with should serve double duty—that is, it should be both our company name and our brand name. That way we would not have to pay double the advertising cost to make both well known.
We tried a symbol for a while, an inverted pyramid inside a thin circle with small wedges cut from the sides of the pyramid to give us a stylized letter “T.” But for our first transistors and for our first transistor radio, we wanted a brand name that was special and clever and that people would remember. We decided our transistor radio would be the first consumer product available to the public with our new brand name on it.
I thought a lot about this when I was in the United States, where I noticed that many companies were using three letter logotypes, such as ABC, NBC, RCA, and AT&T. Some companies were also using just their full name as their logo. This looked like something new to me. When I was a boy, I had learned to recognize the names of imported automobiles by their symbols, the three-pointed star for Mercedes, the blue oval with Ford in it, the Cadillac crown, the Pierce Arrow arrow, the Winged Victory of Rolls-Royce. Later, many car companies began to use their names together with the symbol, like Chevrolet, Ford, Buick, and others, and I could recognize their names even if I couldn’t actually read them. I pondered every possibility.
Ibuka and I took a long time deciding on a name. We agreed we didn’t want a symbol. The name would be the symbol, and therefore it should be short, no more than four or five characters. All Japanese companies have a company badge and a lapel pin, usually in the shape of the company symbol, but except for a prominent few, such as the three diamonds of Mitsubishi, for example, it would be impossible for an outsider to recognize them. Like the automobile companies that began relying less and less on symbols and more and more on their names, we felt we really needed a name to carry our message. Every day we would write down possibilities and discuss them whenever we had the time. We wanted a new name that could be recognized anywhere in the world, one that could be pronounced the same in any language. We made dozens and dozens of tries. Ibuka and I went through dictionaries looking for a bright name, and we came across the Latin word sonus, meaning “sound.” The word itself seemed to have sound in it. Our business was full of sound, so we began to zero in on sonus. At that time in Japan borrowed English slang and nicknames were becoming popular and some people referred to bright young and cute boys as “sonny,” or “sonny-boys,” and, of course, “sunny” and “sonny” both had an optimistic and bright sound similar to the Latin root with which we were working. And we also thought of ourselves as “sonny-boys” in those days. Unfortunately, the single word “sonny” by itself would give us troubles in Japan because in the romanization of our language, the word “sonny” would be pronounced “sohn-nee,” which means to lose money. That was no way to launch a new product. We pondered this problem for a little while and the answer struck me one day: why not just drop one of the letters and make it “Sony”? That was it!
The new name had the advantage of not meaning anything but “Sony” in any language; it was easy to remember, and it carried the connotations we wanted. Furthermore, as I reminded Ibuka, because it was written in roman letters, people in many countries could think of it as being in their own language. All over the world governments were spending money to teach people how to read English and use the roman alphabet, including Japan. And the more people who learned English and the roman alphabet, the more people would recognize our company and product name—at no cost to us.
We kept our old corporate name for some time after we began putting the Sony logotype on our products. For our first product logo, we used a tall, thin sloping initial letter inside a square box, but I soon realized that the best way to get name recognition would be to make the name as legible and simple as possible, so we moved to the more traditional and simple capital letters that remain today. The name itself is the logo.
We managed to produce our first transistorized radio in 1955 and our first tiny “pocketable” transistor radio in 1957. It was the world’s smallest, but actually it was a bit bigger than a standard men’s shirt pocket, and that gave us a problem for a while, even though we never said which pocket we had in mind when we said “pocketable.” We liked the idea of a salesman being able to demonstrate how simple it would be to drop it into a shirt pocket. We came up with a simple solution—we had some shirts made for our salesmen with slightly larger than normal pockets, just big enough to slip the radio into.
The introduction of this proud achievement was tinged with disappointment that our first transistorized radio was not the very first one on the market. An American company called Regency, supported by Texas Instruments, and using TI transistors, put out a radio with the Regency brand name a few months before ours, but the company gave up without putting much effort into marketing it. As the first in the field, they might have capitalized on their position and created a tremendous market for their product, as we did. But they apparently judged mistakenly that there was no future in this business and gave it up.
Our fine little radio carried our company’s new brand name, Sony, and we had big plans for the future of transistorized electronics and hopes that the success of our small “pocketable” radio would be a harbinger of successes to come.
In June 1957, we put up our first billboard carrying the Sony name opposite the entrance to Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport, and at the end of the year we put up another in the heart of the Ginza district of Tokyo. In January 1958 we officially changed our company name to Sony Corporation and were listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange that December.
We had registered the name Sony in one hundred and seventy countries and territories and in various categories, not just electronics, in order to protect it from being used by others on products that would exploit the similarity. But we soon learned that we had failed to protect ourselves from some entrepreneurs right at home in Japan. One day we learned that somebody was selling “Sony” chocolate.
We were very proud of our new corporate name and I was really upset that someone would try to capitalize on it. The company that picked up our name had used a completely different name on their products before and only changed the name when ours became popular. They registered the name “Sony” for a line of chocolates and snack foods and even changed their company trade name to Sony Foods. In their logo they used the same type of letters we used.
In those days we sometimes used a small cartoon character called “Sonny Boy” in our advertising. The character was actually called “Atchan,” and was created by cartoonist Fuyuhiko Okabe of the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. The bogus Sony chocolate merchants started using a
similar cartoon. Seeing this stuff on sale in major department stores made me sick with anger. We took the imposters to court and brought famous people such as entertainers, newspapermen, and critics to confirm the damage that was being done to us. One witness said he thought the appearance of Sony chocolate meant that the Sony Corporation was in financial difficulty if it had to resort to selling chocolate instead of high-technology electronics. Another witness said she had the impression that since Sony was really a technical company, the chocolate must be some kind of synthetic. We were afraid that if these chocolates continued to fill the marketplace, it would completely destroy the trust people had in our company.
I have always believed that a trademark is the life of an enterprise and that it must be protected boldly. A trademark and a company name are not just clever gimmicks—they carry responsibility and guarantee the quality of the product. If someone tries to get a free ride on the reputation and the ability of another who has worked to build up public trust, it is nothing short of thievery. We were not flattered by this theft of our name.
Court cases take a long time in Japan, and the case dragged on for almost four years, but we won. And for the first time in Japanese history, the court used the unfair competition law rather than patent or trademark registration laws in granting us relief. The chocolate people had registered the name, all right, but only after our name had become popular. In trying to prove that the name was open for anyone to use, their lawyers went to the major libraries of the country to show that the name was in the public domain, but they were in for a shock. They came away empty-handed because no matter what dictionaries they went to they could not find the word Sony. We knew they would discover that; we had done it ourselves long before. The name is unique, and it is ours.
