Made In Japan

by Akio Morita

  When I was traveling abroad, I realized that in Britain some of those traditional schools still existed. Most American schools seemed much too permissive to me. In my own case, I had a hard time learning English, and I knew that in the future the world would become smaller and smaller as airplanes became faster and as communications improved, so I wanted all my children to speak English and learn how to work under strong self-discipline.

  I had been thinking about this since my very first trip to the U.S. and Europe eleven years before. When I left the United States for the European part of the trip, I was very hesitant to use my English, but when I got to the Continent I realized that many other travelers from America and other countries could not speak the languages of the European countries they were visiting, and so I was emboldened to speak some English. I met many people on trains who spoke none of the local languages, or even less than I knew of English, and I realized that not speaking fluent German, for example, put all of us in the same boat.

  So I started to use my junior high school English and the bits I knew of German and French, and I discovered I could communicate. Suddenly a group of travelers on a train found everybody had the same problems. We had English in common though, and even though mine was rudimentary, it was good enough to be understood and it was accepted. When I returned to New York after that trip to Europe, I surprised everybody by speaking English. My Japanese friend Shido Yamada, who had done the interpreting for me while I was closing the transistor licensing deal prior to leaving for Europe, was astounded. Before I left the States, I spoke only Japanese with him and during all the negotiations. Now, a month later, I was speaking English! He thought for a while that I had learned English during my month-long visit to non-English-speaking countries in Europe. Actually, I explained to him, it was just a matter of gaining enough confidence, and the European trip gave me that confidence.

  During my search for schools, many of my British friends told me about the prep school at Atlantic College, and I wanted to send my oldest son, Hideo, there, but it didn’t work out because he was already a year too old for the prep school. When the children came home from America, we decided to put them back one grade in Japan to make certain they got all the essentials, Japanese language and history, and so on.

  My wife and I spent a lot of time in Britain looking for a school for Hideo, who was in his second year of high school then. Yoshiko made quite a science of it, traveling all around Britain with a friend, the wife of one of our executives based in London, Midori Namiki, a famous TV personality for quite a while in Japan when she was the first hostess of the Japanese version of the children’s program “Romper Room.”

  (It was ironic that we had Midori and her husband, Masa Namiki, with us on our school search in Britain. You see, when we were developing Chromatron color TV, “Romper Room” was the only daytime program on Japanese television that was broadcast in color. No matter what we were doing in those days, when someone would yell, “Hey, it’s ten o’clock!” we would all rush to the lab to see how our experimental sets were performing. Getting genuine, natural color, especially the flesh tones, was crucial, and so I would check the colors very carefully. In fact I had scrutinized Mrs. Namiki’s face to the smallest detail, and I have joked with her husband that maybe I have looked at her more closely than he, at least when she was on TV.)

  I think Yoshiko and Midori visited more than a dozen boarding schools in Britain before she found the school she was looking for, a two-year boarding school that took only fifty students. Hideo found it very difficult, but he applied himself, and in the second year he was named Head Boy. He took A and O levels and was accepted at two British universities. But because of his weakness in subjects like European history and literature, they accepted him only in science, and he didn’t want that. “I don’t want to compete with my father,” he said. He was more interested in economics.

  Masao jokes that he was forced into going to Atlantic College. The headmaster, Admiral Hall, was visiting Japan and had been referred to me while he was looking for funding. It happened that Masao had a day off from school and was visiting me in the office when Admiral Hall was there. “I was trapped,” Masao says now. He was interviewed and tested on the spot and given an acceptance.

  Atlantic College is an interesting place, located in a one-hundred-and-thirty-five-room castle on a small estate at St. Donat’s in southern Glamorganshire County, Wales, about fifty miles from Cardiff. It was built in the eleventh century, and its owners kept adding to it. The American press magnate, William Randolph Hearst, bought the castle about 1934 and added tennis courts and a huge swimming pool. The movie actress Marion Davies, Hearst’s mistress, once said that when she and W. R., as she referred to him, would arrive for one of their rare visits, about forty Welsh singers wearing high silk hats and lace dresses would line up on the lawn to sing a welcome for them. In 1938 Hearst put it up for sale, but the British Army requisitioned it for officer training during the war. In 1960 it was bought by a rich donor and given to the school. Masao spent two years there, graduated, and was accepted at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Hideo came back to college in Japan. For a time I considered starting a cattle ranch in Brazil, and Hideo was interested in managing it, so he transferred to the University of California at Davis, where he studied agricultural economics for two years before returning to graduate from Ashiya University here in Japan. I never did buy the ranch, though.

  Naoko had a more complicated schooling than the boys. At first she said she didn’t want to go to college, which was partially my fault because I had written a book called Never Mind School Records, a kind of tract against overemphasis on college ties in the business world in Japan. I established a policy at my company of disregarding school records once an employee was hired so that nobody would be tempted to judge a person on his academic background rather than on his proven ability and performance or what his potential seemed to be. This is because so much emphasis—too much—is placed on the mere name of the university you attend in Japan.

  Naoko studied French in high school and then we found a finishing school in Lausanne, Switzerland, for her. But although she was very successful academically (she also won an award as an outstanding volleyball and basketball player), she felt the French language as spoken by the Swiss was not the pure Parisian dialect she wanted to speak, so we sent her to Paris, where she stayed a year and acquired the accent she wanted. English was next, and so she came to Washington and enrolled in language classes at Georgetown, where Masao was studying at the time. She later studied fashion design in Los Angeles, and when she came home she was completely cosmopolitan. When she went away, Naoko was very shy, and when she came back to us she was full of cheer, lively and confident. She and her husband, a sales engineer for Kyoto Ceramics (Kyocera), have recently been transferred from California back to Tokyo.

  I have learned a lot from my children’s education, too, mainly that the exposure to other cultures teaches an insular Japanese that he is Japanese and in the minority in the world. He learns to appreciate his Japanese-ness, but also to understand that he must fit into the world, and not the other way around. Yoshiko says that one of the important things to be learned is that “foreigners” are individually different, have different ideas, different religions, different backgrounds. And so our excursion abroad opened the minds of the Morita family, and we can feel comfortable anywhere in the world, though Japan is our true home.

  V

  I was traveling more than ever during the middle sixties. At Sony we had been deeply involved in video even before I took up residence in the United States. The idea of video tape recorders for home use had been in our minds and on our drawing boards for a couple of years. Television, still black and white, was booming everywhere and we were selling as many sets as we could make. Ampex in America was making large video tape recorders for broadcast use, and it had struck Ibuka and me that there should be no reason why people would not want to have a video recorder at home just as they
had audio tape recorders for home, personal use. We were supported in this belief by some very progressive young staffers and associates. One of them was Norio Ohga, who had been a vocal arts student at the Tokyo University of Arts when he saw our first audio tape recorder back in 1950. I had had my eye on him for all those years because of his bold criticism of our first machine. He was a great champion of the tape recorder, but he was severe with us because he didn’t think our early machine was good enough. It had too much wow and flutter, he said. He was right, of course; our first machine was rather primitive. We invited him to be a paid critic even while he was still in school. His ideas were very challenging. He said then, “A ballet dancer needs a mirror to perfect her style, her technique. A singer needs the same—an aural mirror.” (Ohga is now the president of Sony.) The idea of a mirror is very apt. We had one kind of mirror in the audio tape recorder, and with video we had an even better mirror than the mere audio tape. If only we could perfect it.

  The first Ampex video tape units for broadcasting stations were huge, almost filling a room, and they cost one hundred thousand dollars and more. They used two-inch-wide tape in open reels, and that was really cumbersome. We had to design a small system that people could install in their homes and we knew it would take a long time. We built several models, each one smaller than the last, starting with two-inch tape in an open reel machine, which we put into Pan Am and American Airlines planes for passenger entertainment back in the early sixties. Then we brought the tape size down to three-quarters of an inch and built a cassette to handle the tape, like an audio cassette but much bigger. We called it U-Matic, and since we introduced it in 1969 it has become the standard all over the world, replacing the big two-inch units in broadcasting stations.

  The U-Matic machine also became an industrial machine. Ford Motor Company bought five thousand units for use in their agencies, to train mechanics and salesmen. Many thousands of these units were put into use by other companies for the training of technicians and sales personnel and are still being manufactured, sold, and used today, all over the world. It is the most popular machine of its kind in broadcasting. We were actually a bit surprised at the speed with which our videotape cameras and U-Matic systems replaced sixteen-millimeter film in broadcasting stations. Electronic news gathering, ENG as it came to be known, came about because the machinery was so practical. The cameras are small and easy to handle; with videotape there is no lost time between shooting and editing; and no high costs were needed to build and maintain film processing labs.

  But Ibuka was not satisfied. This machine would never be a home unit because it was still expensive and much too big. Using half-inch tape, we produced the world’s first all-transistor video tape recorder for home use, and we kept adding models, but Ibuka was never satisfied. He wanted a truly small unit with a very handy cassette. He returned to the office one day from a trip to the United States, and he called together the video development group. He emphasized that the home video tape recorder was the most important project at hand and that the size of the unit was crucial. He reached into his pocket, took out a paperback book he had bought at the airport in New York, and placed it on the table. “This is the size I need for the cassette,” he said. “This is your target. I want at least one hour of program time on a cassette that size.” That was the challenge that created the original Betamax system.

  In television, color was the thing. We had a lot of experience with black and white, but color was quite a new story for us. In the early sixties, there was a lot of development going on in the color field, and although the RCA shadow mask system became the standard picked by the FCC, Ibuka thought we ought to reinvent color TV ourselves. We were behind many of our competitors with color, but we wanted something new, something better. Ibuka wanted to study TV from the basic principles. We did not like CBS’s rotating filter design or the RCA shadow mask design. There was another system, invented by Professor Ernest O. Lawrence of the University of California, that looked intriguing. Lawrence was the physicist who had invented the cyclotron. His color picture tube was called Chromatron, and it differed considerably from the other designs. The concept was technically very interesting, if complex, and when the system was adjusted properly it was extremely bright and efficient. We committed ourselves to it very early by buying a license in 1962 from Paramount Pictures, which held the patent, although we knew that production costs for the picture tube would be high and that there would be many technical problems. We only made thirteen thousand Chromatron sets, all of them sold in Japan, before we gave up. Meanwhile, we had been working on our own tube, a new idea that we finally called Trinitron.

  Our competitors were using a system in which three separate electron guns at the back of the picture tube emitted the TV picture in the form of a series of red, green, and blue electron beams focused by lenses at the shadow mask, a plate with many holes located behind the face of the picture tube. The electron beams had to be focused on the holes in the mask, and they had to pass to the face of the picture tube, where they created the picture as they activated the colored phosphor on the inside of the face of the tube. The Chromatron system used one gun instead of three to generate the three electron beams, and a set of thin wires instead of a shadow mask permitted more of the electron beams to reach the face of the picture tube, where, instead of dots, strips of colored phosphor were used. This system gave a much brighter picture than any of the others, but there were many technical problems. High voltage, switching on and off, had to be applied to the wires, and we had trouble getting it to work reliably from the beginning. But while we were trying to fix it, we were working feverishly on our own new system. Ibuka never wanted to settle for somebody else’s design, and even as we tried to make Chromatron work, he spent long hours in the lab working side by side with the engineers on Chromatron and also on the new system we were trying to develop.

  We revised the three-gun “delta” system, packaging all three into one that emitted three electron beams as in the Chromatron tube, but we focused them with one large lens instead of a series of lenses. We were going for compactness and efficiency. Instead of a grille composed of a complicated set of wires or the shadow mask, we produced a simple, low-cost metal grille, actually a plate with long slots etched in it.

  Our system gave us 30 percent more transparency—in our system more of the beams struck the face of the tube than in the shadow mask system. Our system was twice as bright and used less power. We began to make twelve-inch and seven-inch Trinitron sets, and of course they were expensive. It was our policy to charge a premium for our products. At an annual meeting of RCA, President Robert Samoff was asked about our new competitive tube design and he said that only the RCA shadow mask design “has passed the crucial test of mass production on an economic basis.” When I was asked about this comment I couldn’t help smiling. “The situation is normal,” I told a reporter for Business Week magazine. “They laughed when we introduced both the transistor radio and the small TV set.” We had no competition making small color TV sets. It was possible to buy a twenty-three-inch black and white television set in the United States in a big cabinet for the same four hundred dollars we charged for our personal color set then. I predicted at the time that by the end of the year (it was 1968), there would be ten million households in America with color sets, most of them in the living room. But I believed, and rightly, as it turned out, that people would want a personalized set they could take into the kitchen or the bedroom, or even outdoors in the daytime. To go out onto the American patio for a lunchtime barbecue or a rest in the hammock with your TV set, you need portability and a very bright picture, and we had both. Our strategy of making small sets was not new. Our first transistorized black and white set made in 1959 was bucking what many said was the market trend for bigger sets. When we began making integrated circuits for our products, we produced a little three-ounce radio you could carry on the end of a key chain, and we even put a radio in a watch, but that was just to show that it cou
ld be done. And, of course, new technology for TV now enables us to make a television set you can carry in your pocket. Oh, yes, as for our efforts in devising our own color TV system, we were very pleased in 1972 when, in the U.S., the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded Sony an Emmy for the development of Trinitron. It was the first time an Emmy had been given for a product. Sony received a second Emmy, in 1976, for the U-Matic video tape recording system.

  VI

  Our business at home and overseas was booming. We had begun to make desktop calculators in 1964, and I thought this would be a good addition to our product line. We demonstrated what we considered to be the world’s first solid-state desktop calculator at the New York World’s Fair in March of 1964. I went there to demonstrate it, something I have always enjoyed doing. (In fact, one day in New York I was demonstrating our video camera to a reporter from New York Times when I heard fire engines outside. I looked out the window and saw smoke coming from our own basement, so I grabbed the camera and filmed the scene as the fire fighters arrived, then played it back for the reporter immediately. It was the most convincing demonstration I could have given.)

  We later marketed a special calculator model we called SOBAX, which stood for “solid state abacus.” But I soon realized that several dozen Japanese companies had jumped into the business of making calculators, and I knew the shakeout would come sooner or later through a very brutal price war. That is the way it is on the Japanese market, and it was just the kind of thing we have always wanted to avoid. When it became obvious that others would be discounting dangerously to get a share of the market, we gave up the calculator business.