Pacific

by Simon Winchester

  This is not to say that failure plays no part in Japanese society—far from it, indeed. To watch a sushi chef, for example, compelling his apprentice to cook tamago (the egg-and-vinegar-and-soy-sauce omelet that is a key component of a full-blown nigiri dinner) is to watch the pursuit of perfection through the repetition of countless attempts, most of which initially fail. Time and again the youngster falls short of making satisfactory tamago, and each time, the master contemptuously throws it away. Yet no shame is attached to the apprentice’s failures, even though they seem to happen day after day and day. For, eventually, one hopes, the boy succeeds in this crucial task, is ultimately inducted into the corps of the minimally accomplished, and then slowly, painstakingly, makes his way toward becoming an acceptable sushi chef. Failure is just part of the process—in this and many other callings in Japanese life.

  But science is very different from sushi making. Japanese cuisine is a time-honored craft, with teachers (sensei) who will cajole and berate an apprentice along the hard road to success. A scientist, on the other hand, has to engage alone, in a quest for the undiscovered and the unknown. He has to trust himself to do so without a sensei at his elbow, with only his own curiosity to compel him. This would be a formidably difficult challenge for any scientist. For one who might be further burdened by the concept of “face,” by the abhorrence of public failure, even more so.

  The great empiricists, from Bacon and Galileo through to Watson and Crick, all failed, but a mark of their greatness was that they never abandoned their quest for scientific truth. The same cannot easily be said of those early East Asian scientists, particularly those who worked during the years of the Enlightenment in the West. Such advances as were made in Europe of the time were simply not happening in the East, no matter the centuries of progress (most especially Chinese progress) in the years before. Puzzlement over just why this was has generated interminable debate over the years. The so-called Needham Question3—why, after so much earlier progress, was there so little advance in China after the fifteenth century?—distills this, and has never been satisfactorily answered. Face is suggested as a component, one among many.

  It was clearly a component in those early Totsuko days. One member of the research team working on the licensed transistors remarked that “the voice of Bell Labs is like the voice of God”—implying that for his Japanese colleagues to try to do anything different from the way the Americans were doing things back in Murray Hill would be to court failure, disaster, and the consequent loss of mentsu—and if not that, then perhaps also to humiliate the generosity of the licensees at Bell Labs, to cause them to lose face also. Respect for others, for elders, for perceived betters—these were concepts similarly central to Chinese and Japanese thinking: while it was dangerously uncomfortable to lose face yourself, it was unforgivably shameful to cause another to lose face. So, at first, timidity ruled in the Totsuko laboratories on the floors high above the tape recorder production line. Everyone was nervous, and for many weeks during 1953 and the first months of 1954, nothing very much was done, and less was accomplished.

  Such hesitancy sorely tested Ibuka and his team of leaders, all of whom were doing their best to spur the scientists upstairs to do their best. Months after their successful purchase of the Western Electric transistor license, it was starting to seem as if they might never create anything better than the American model.

  They seemed unable in particular to take the radical steps necessary to achieve the one technically risky but most commercially vital thing: to create a unique kind of transistor that was powerful enough and would work at a high enough frequency to allow the miniature radio set that Masaru Ibuka demanded his company manufacture to work. And this was causing major problems for the accountants. The income from the tape recorder business might still be healthy, but the burn rate (the payment of salaries to all these scientists and engineers who for all these complicated reasons were achieving rather little) was getting out of hand.

  Months ensued, of cajolery and chemistry, of patience and physics. Ibuka and Iwama continued to write home from America, cabling their more urgent instructions for making the needed transistors. BUY HEAVY DUTY DIFFUSION FURNACE, one cable read. ACQUIRE DIAMOND GRINDER FOR SLICING GERMANIUM CRYSTALS, read another. Then, slowly, beating against the undertow of traditional thinking, the team in Japan started to nudge its way toward success. The timid became the tentative. Hesitancy morphed into determination, and the dragging weight of mentsu began to evaporate. Progress started, and through the mist the vision of the true Japanese transistor started to solidify.

  The first device was completed late in the summer of 1954, while Ibuka and Iwama were still in America. It was in essence just a fair copy of that made at Bell Labs—a so-called point-contact transistor, primitive and not so small. But the principle was established: the needle on the detecting oscillator swung, with all watching nervously, indicating that the gadget was indeed creating an amplified output. By the time Iwama arrived back home, the team already had a more sophisticated model, a junction-type transistor with a perfectly cut germanium crystal—sliced with a rusty old cutting machine that had been found out in the rain in a Tokyo suburb—that was making the oscillator swing its needle even more vehemently. The little company that could was finally on its way to perfecting an invention.

  The technology behind what is now an entirely routine procedure—even if we don’t entirely understand what they are doing, we are well accustomed now to seeing images of workers in protective suits in brilliantly lit, clean rooms, directing the etching of tiny circuits onto minuscule slices of semiconducting material—was, in the 1950s, dauntingly complex. But using a procedure that Bell Labs had tried and discarded, a technique known as phosphorous doping, Totsuko eventually made the breakthrough it had long sought.

  In June 1955, six months after the Iwama expedition to America, the company set up its first grown-crystal transistor production line. In the first weeks, maybe only five in a hundred of them worked; Ibuka’s sanguine view was that so long as a single transistor worked, then perfecting the production technique could be accomplished at the very same time that production was under way. So the button was pressed, the factory started producing, and hundreds of tiny radio-frequency, high-powered, grown-crystal, phosphorous-doped Japanese-made transistors began cascading off the line.

  Now all the company had to do was make a radio to put them in; to establish a brand name under which to market and sell this radio; and then proceed to change the lives of millions. This is what Ibuka demanded, and this is what he, Kazuo Iwama, and Akio Morita achieved.

  There were hiccups, of course. An American company based in Indianapolis, named Regency, launched the first-ever transistor radio, the TR-1, in October 1954. “See it! Hear it! Get it!” blared the advertisements. Jewelry stores in New York and Los Angeles sold the sleek little sets for $49.95. The TR-1 sold well initially, but performed poorly: radio reception was often scratchy, and the set ran out of power too quickly to be of much use.

  The first-ever Totsuko radio rolled off the production line in the spring of 1955. Called the TR-52, it was a tall rectangle, the size of a large cigarette packet. The four hundred square holes of its white plastic speaker grille looked like tiny windows, leading critics to say it resembled Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer’s UN headquarters, opened in New York two years before, and causing the radio to be called “the UN Building.” Totsuko made a hundred of them, but the TR-52 never went on sale, because the grille bent and peeled off in hot weather. It was, or could have been, a major embarrassment.

  However, the Bulova Watch Company saw the prototype—in cool weather, presumably—and very much liked the concept. Buoyed by the news of Regency’s very modest success, Bulova reached out to Morita and ordered one hundred thousand of his radios, a staggering number.

  Yet, to the dismayed astonishment of all back in Japan, Morita balked. He refused to take the order as offered. He did so because the American firm declared that it want
ed to sell the radio in America under the Bulova name—and to that, Morita, a proud man, simply would not and could not agree. Especially since, just a few days prior to receiving the order, he and his colleagues had decided to rename their company, to call it Sony.

  The employment of the name Sony came about entirely because of the American market. Morita had found that almost no one in the United States could pronounce either Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, the company’s formal name, or its diminutive, Totsuko. Something easier was needed, he wrote in a company memo. Something short; four-lettered, if possible. Something memorable, like “Ford.”

  The Totsuko principals explored only modestly, searching either for an existing word or for an arbitrary word—Kodak, created at the whim of George Eastman fifty years before, seemed an ideal. They thought of two-letter words, with which the Japanese language abounds, but to which English mainly consigns prepositions. They considered three-letter combinations (NBC, CBS, NHK). Perhaps their own existing initials, TTK, might work. But then they began to think of four-letter combinations. The name of Ford kept striking Morita as ideal, as being brand perfection—so he and Ibuka combed through their various dictionaries. As to whether they had a Latin dictionary to hand, corporate history is silent; but somehow or other they eventually came across the Latin word for sound (the ultimate product of all their engineering), and liked what they found: the Latin word sonus. Five letters, true, but very nearly perfect.

  Since 1928, when Al Jolson had sung, “Climb upon my knee, Sonny boy, / Though you’re only three, Sonny Boy,” the term Sonny had won widespread affection, especially in America. Occupation forces, now three years gone, would throw sticks of Wrigley’s gum to children, calling out, “There you are, sonny!” The word had pleasing connotations. It echoed the Latin word. It was easy to pronounce. It had universal appeal. And to make it into a Ford-like quadrilateral just a small modification in pronunciation and spelling was needed. Thus, in 1955, the word Sony was born. The word. The company. And history.

  Stubborn to the end, Bulova refused to use the name on its products. “Who ever heard of Sony?” asked the president. Akio Morita politely replied, “Half a century ago people would have asked—who ever heard of Bulova?” But no ice was cut. The American’s heart did not melt. And so Morita, with exaggerated courtesy, left the office—without the precious order for a hundred thousand radios. If Japan’s first transistor radio was going to sell in America, then it would be called a Sony—and the Sony team would have to do their best to sell it themselves. The company’s future was now very much on the line.

  A concatenation of curious events then got under way. The melting plastic grille prevented the firm from ever producing a significant number of the TR-52s that Bulova had wanted. Instead, the more modish and functional TR-55 was the radio that made its debut in Winnipeg in the late summer of 1955. This was the radio bought by a lucky few blisteringly hot Canadians, and which allowed them to listen to the CBC while under their garden shade trees. And if any of the sets found their way to the United States, it was more by luck than adroit corporate judgment.

  Whether the American makers of the Regency TR-1 ever saw an example of the Sony radio remains unknown. But something frightened them or their backers. For, suddenly, the firm announced that it would stop manufacturing the sets and would withdraw from the marketplace. It was a decision (still quite inexplicable, even at this remove) that left a gaping hole in the radio marketplace, and one that the newly named Sony Corporation4 was poised, and happy, to exploit.

  The device that Sony then made in an effort to fill this gap was designated the TR-63, the so-called pocketable radio. Company lore has it that Sony created the word pocketable, but the word made its first recorded appearance in the English language as far back as 1699. The same internal histories suggest also that this radio wasn’t exactly as pocketable as the brochures had it. It certainly didn’t fit into the breast pockets of most Japanese shirts. The wily Mr. Morita, it is said, had his salesmen’s shirts modified with a slightly bigger pocket, so their demonstrations of pocketability could invariably progress without mishap.

  Such claims may well have been buffed by time and expensive PR firms, and perhaps understandably so. The event that truly made this elegant little radio famous, and that made Sony a familiar name into the bargain, was entirely true, and involved a robbery.

  The tale appeared on page 17 of the New York Times of Friday, January 17, 1958. Most of the other news items close by were quite routine. Noël Coward had a cold, and so could not go on for his matinee performance of Nude with Violin. Winston Churchill’s actress-daughter Sarah, who had already been fined fifty dollars for disorderly conduct in Malibu, was now in the hospital suffering from exhaustion and emotional upset. A twenty-five-year-old prostitute named Sally Mae Quinn had squeezed her evidently rather slender self through an eight-inch window to become the first person ever to break out of a prison for women in Greenwich Village—though the trail of blood on the roadway thirty-five feet below the window suggested to police she might have something of a limp.

  But the lead story on page 17 was of somewhat greater moment: “4,000 Tiny Radios Stolen in Queens,” read the headline. The story was a sensation. A manager named Vincent Ciliberti, turning up for his morning shift at Delmonico International, an import-export company based across from the Sunnyside rail freight station in Long Island City, had discovered to his alarmed dismay that, during the night, a posse of thieves had broken in through a second-floor window and taken “400 cartons of green, red, black and lemon-colored radios.”

  The men had then, apparently displaying great fortitude and eagerness, broken no fewer than four locks to get into a freight elevator, backed a truck up to a loading bay, moved the radios in their boxes onto a pair of skids, and then hauled them onto the back of the truck, and vanished into the darkness.

  Each carton held ten of these tiny radios, which Delmonico had been holding before sending them off to the stores to sell at $40 apiece. Some $160,000 worth of high-tech merchandise had just disappeared into the wilderness of outer New York City. It was the lead story on the city’s radio stations throughout the day. Detectives were investigating what was said to be the biggest heist of electronics equipment in American history. More than fifty potential witnesses were questioned at length. No one, of course, had seen a thing.

  Then, confirming the adage about ill winds and the doing of good, came a crucial piece of information. Delmonico, reported the Times, “is the sole importer and distributor of Sony Radio, built in Japan. Each of the $40 radios is 1¼ inches thick, 2¾ inches wide and 4½ inches high.” A search suggests that this was the first time the name Sony had ever appeared in the New York Times.

  Most crucially of all—and most delightfully, so far as Tokyo was concerned—it was only these Sony-brand radios that had been taken. Left behind, unclaimed and disdained, were twenty cases of other radios, and several tons of other electronics equipment. Since only the Sony devices were taken, it suggested to most readers of the paper that Sony radios were the highest-value items, the only radios worth stealing. If the thieves thought they were good and valuable, then they probably were.

  That truly set the market afire. The little radio promptly became an essential. To this day, most Americans of a certain age remember their first transistor radio: a small plastic box, with a tinny loudspeaker and perhaps an earphone, that could be smuggled into high school, perhaps so that a baseball game could be listened to during algebra; or taken in the Impala at night to provide soft music while one was parked on a clifftop, hoping for rather more than the view.

  All of a sudden an entire new industry swept into being, an industry bent on employing electronics, and devices with electronics at their heart, for the sole purpose of entertaining, amusing, and informing the public—either en masse or, more often, in person. Other manufacturers might continue to satisfy other, more traditional demands of heating, lighting, clothing, feeding, and moving the public about. Others might buil
d cars or ships, mine coal, make stoves or washing machines or razor blades. But this new industry skillfully blended technology with the humanities, married the machine to the artist; and by doing so, its leaders were seeking to improve the daily lives of the average person by amusing and interesting him, by playing on his emotions and to his sentiments. It did so by the employment of transistors, semiconductors, and printed circuit boards.

  The term consumer electronics was instantly coined5 to describe this new business—backed by an industry that was born on the Pacific Rim, and has in one form or another come to play a sustaining central role in the betterment of human life, in most corners of the world.

  And Sony, in Tokyo, one of the first entrants into the business that it had invented, promptly did its best to satisfy the market it had created. Factories expanded and hummed with energy, and hired thousands; and more plants were built, some hastily, most in more considered fashion, and with both investors and company bosses now cleaving to a firm belief in the firm’s ever-more-settled future. Smokestacks belched, machines roared, heavily laden trucks lumbered off to the airport—entire cargo planes had to be chartered from the newly formed Japan Air Lines to meet Christmas demand—and containers, containers, containers were packed with boxes, bound in those early days for Seattle, Long Beach, and San Francisco Bay, and later for just about every major maritime port.