Japan Story

by Christopher Harding

  A quarter of a million dollars could now be put into making hundreds of prototype transistors, eventually yielding a device capable of running a radio – something Bell Laboratories had cautioned would not be possible. Production remained deeply flawed: TTEC had to throw away ninety-five out of every one hundred transistors they made. But in 1955, their radio was finally ready for the shops. And though an American company beat them to the accolade of the world’s first transistor radio by just a month, TTEC’s was the world’s smallest – and two years later they cut the size even further. Channelling the spirit of Japan’s old-time pedlars of dodgy potions and rootless bonsai trees, Morita had special shirts made for his sales team, featuring slightly over-sized pockets. Their product thus became the world’s first ‘pocketable’ radio – available in a selection of yellow, red, green or black.

  Morita was determined not to pay double for his marketing, by having a brand name that was different from the company name. But ‘Tokyo Tsūshin Kōgyō’ was a long name to fit onto small products and to American customers it meant nothing – or at least nothing positive, so soon after the war. So Morita and his colleagues began to cast around for something else. Flicking through a dictionary, they came across sonus – ‘sound’. It wasn’t bad, but it reminded them of something better, a phrase the GIs used, its bright, fresh associations so attractive that Morita and co. had been applying it to themselves as they worked away in their shack. They were ‘sonny-boys’, so surely their company was Sonny. Better still, Sony. Yes, that would do.

  The legend, as it built, was inseparable from America. The United States was Sony’s inspiration in everything: from the shock of the advanced weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, through tape technology, the transistor and a vogue for abbreviated brands (IBM, AT&T), all the way to Morita’s dream of establishing ‘Sony America’ and his proud unfurling of a Japanese flag on New York’s Fifth Avenue when the company opened a showroom there in 1962. Along with his colleague Ibuka Masaru, Morita became one of Japan’s first jet-setting businessmen. And while Morita went as far as setting up home in the US, Ibuka’s son got used to his father returning from work trips with armfuls of slightly broken American toys – each one taken apart to see how it was made.

  Japan had technical know-how in abundance, together with entrepreneurs of such talent and motivation that they would later be celebrated around the world as gurus, even gods. Hotel notepaper scribbles by Morita and Ibuka were treated as holy relics by Sony HQ, handled with trembling, white-gloved devotion on the rare occasions that they were brought out for display. But it was American commercial and diplomatic support that helped to release all this potential into the world. And that was not offered free of charge.

  While Morita and Ibuka were busy building their company in the early 1950s, the United States was playing chaperone as Japan re-entered the international community. John Foster Dulles was tasked by President Truman in 1950 with agreeing a peace treaty with Japan’s former victims and enemies, most of whom gathered around a conference table in San Francisco the following year. South East Asian nations wanted reparations. Britain, like Japan, was improvising a transition from running a colonial trading bloc to accepting more evenly balanced terms of global trade. Its leaders wanted to limit Japanese competition in Asia, and especially on the Indian subcontinent. What the Soviet Union wanted more than anything was to have been included at a much earlier stage of the process. Its delegates were suspicious of plans to sign a US–Japan Security Treaty alongside the peace treaty: a remilitarized Japan, they argued, was being established as an American client state and Pacific staging area. Missing from the room entirely were the two Koreas, currently at war, and the two Chinas: the People’s Republic, on the mainland, and the Republic, now sheltering on Taiwan.

  Sony’s ‘pocketable’ TR-63 radio (1957), a little over 10 centimetres high Dulles also faced complications inside Japan, where a large chunk of the population wanted to see their country re-enter the world unarmed and neutral. There had been enormous disquiet at GHQ’s decision, within weeks of the Korean War breaking out, to create a National Police Reserve (NPR) consisting of 75,000 men. The force was charged with tackling domestic insurrection only, and was run by former Home Ministry civil servants. But the Americans, who equipped it and sought its enlargement, regarded the NPR from the outset as the nucleus of a future Japanese army. And indeed it would have been an impressive domestic insurrection whose quelling required the use of bazookas, flame-throwers, mortars, tanks and artillery.

  Where threats to the Emperor had helped to bring Japan’s leaders to heel over the Constitution, now it was the turn of the country’s economic prospects to be dangled over the abyss. Everything from loans and technology transfer to assistance with economic integration with South East Asia was made contingent upon Japan acquiescing to America’s basic post-Occupation demands: US bases on Japanese soil and modest Japanese rearmament. Yoshida regarded economic recovery as the absolute priority for Japan, and thought it naïve to imagine that his country could do anything other than take America’s side in world affairs while benefiting from its protection – such was the ‘Yoshida Doctrine’. So although he pushed back as hard as he could against American demands for the NPR to grow, a San Francisco Peace Treaty and accompanying Security Treaty were duly signed in September 1951, coming into force the following year.

  When the Occupation ended in April 1952, critics were hard pressed to tell the difference. Okinawa remained in American hands. GIs remained very much in evidence in many corners of the country. And Japan still lacked the ability to set independent economic and foreign policies. Just as GHQ had drafted Japan’s Constitution, so Dulles had drafted a letter to himself from Yoshida, in which the latter stated unequivocally that his government had ‘no intention’ of concluding a treaty with communist China. Dulles duly made the letter public in January 1952, and that was that. The terrible chasm that existed between Japan and the mainland, opened up by successive wars from the late nineteenth century onwards, would go unbridged for a little while longer – officially, at least – while the country instead signed a peace treaty with the communists’ arch-rivals down on Taiwan.

  Opinion polls the following month suggested that half of the population thought that Yoshida was simply lying when he maintained that their country was not ‘rearming’. In March, he admitted that he didn’t think Japan’s new Constitution prohibited ‘war potential for self-defence’. Two years later there finally emerged, from a jumble of acronyms and agencies possessing strategically abstract names, the ‘Jieitai’ or ‘Self-Defence Forces’, complete with land, sea and air components. The SDF were a far cry from the imperial forces of a decade before. They were under the firm control of the Diet, and the civilian bureaucrats who oversaw them, day to day, retained vivid and salutary memories of an era when men in uniform had been permitted real authority. But the new forces nonetheless faced a long and difficult struggle to earn public acceptance and trust.

  With Japan’s basic post-war arrangements settled, the country began to rejoin the international community, one institution at a time: the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in 1952; the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1955; the United Nations in 1956. The United States meanwhile tolerated a dollar–yen exchange rate that was advantageous to Japanese exporters and chose not to retaliate against Japan’s harsh import arrangements for disadvantaging American products.

  Those arrangements included tariffs that made the import of American cars prohibitively expensive, and regulations on foreign investment that prevented the likes of Ford and GM simply building their cars in Japan, as they had done before the war. Instead, the only way that they could now make money in Japan was to sell their designs and technology to Japanese partners. In this way, and with the help of wartime aircraft engineers left with little else to build, a Japanese automobile industry whose first product in 1907 had sold just ten units – eight of those to the police – began its slow emergence
as a global player. Nihon Sangyō Corporation – ‘Nissan’ – had thrived making trucks and buses for the armed forces during the war. Now, it imported components and equipment from the British company Austin, built and sold the cars, and sent back around 3 per cent of the sale price to Austin.

  By the early 1960s, companies like Nissan found that they had all the expertise they needed, and so terminated their external agreements. As the Japanese economy grew, demand for their products in the country’s relatively large domestic market steadily picked up, as it did for a whole host of pre-war companies who had been busy reinventing themselves for the new era thanks to transistors and integrated circuits. Toshiba (‘Tokyo Shibaura Denki’), NEC (Nippon Electric Company), Hitachi and Panasonic were all Meiji- and Taishō-era electrics companies, joined on the world stage as major Japanese brands by two other companies that had branched out and changed their names: a maker of ‘Ever-Sharp’ mechanical pencils had turned its hand to calculators and televisions as ‘Sharp’, while the camera-maker Precision Optical Industry Company had become ‘Canon’, named after the Buddhist bodhisattva Kannon.

  A rare opportunity now appeared on the horizon for all these companies: a chance to reach a global audience with their names and products via the youthful, thrusting innocence of the world’s greatest festival of international sport. The Olympics was coming to Tokyo. Japan would finally shake off old images of warmongering and poverty, becoming instead what the Americans had promised back in 1947: a beacon, at last, of the modern bright life.

  *

  The Mayor of Tokyo couldn’t believe his luck. What better way of advertising a city’s rapid recovery and re-entry into the global community than welcoming all the peoples of the world to visit, as guests and witnesses? Having a flame – lit in the ancient cultural crucible of that community – make a lavishly publicized journey all the way to your door? From Olympia along the old Silk Road, on foot and on horseback, via Athens, Istanbul, Tehran, Herat, Kabul, Peshawar, Delhi, Benares, Calcutta, Mandalay, Hanoi, Canton, Hankou, Mukden, Seoul and Pusan; and from there, across the water to Shimonoseki on Honshū, onwards through Okayama, Kobe, Nagoya and finally to Tokyo.

  Thousands upon thousands of visitors would have their image of Japan finally moved beyond the exotic reductions of Mount Fuji and geisha. They would surely like what they saw, and once they spread the word back home a tourist industry would build. Predictably, there were worries about cost. Some asked whether a more modest torch relay might be in order. Couldn’t we just send a Japanese warship to Olympia to pick it up? Perhaps a squadron of kamikaze pilots should make the trip, breaking aviation records along the way?

  It was difficult to reconcile such suggestions with the ethos of the Games. But such were the times: the Tokyo Olympics were scheduled for 1940. The date was fortuitous, calculated long ago by Meiji-era bureaucrats as the 2600th anniversary of Japan’s foundation by the legendary Emperor Jimmu, descendant of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. The world could now be brought in on those celebrations: the West coming east, recognizing an ancient civilization to rival its own, and marvelling at a city gloriously reborn after the 1923 earthquake. There was historic significance even in the make-up of the organizing committee: its head was none other than Prince Tokugawa Iesato, heir to the last Tokugawa Shogun.

  Soon, however, parts of the original relay route ran through war zones – some of them created by Japan. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) had been remarkably indulgent of Japanese foreign policy up to this point. Acutely aware that its ‘global’ games had not thus far been hosted outside Europe and the United States, the IOC eagerly awarded the 1940 event to Tokyo – three years after Japan’s withdrawal from the League of Nations. For a while, the way seemed clear for Tokyo to follow in the footsteps of Berlin, where in 1936 Hitler and his film-maker Leni Riefenstahl set a high bar for using sport to spotlight a country’s spirit, its genetically impeccable population and its shimmering sense of global purpose. Even all-out war with China, bloody violence at Shanghai and Nanjing making international headlines, failed to put the IOC off. In the end, it was Japan’s sense of ‘global purpose’ that put paid to the 1940 Tokyo Olympics, and to the Winter Games scheduled for the same year in its northern city Sapporo. The country’s leaders notified the IOC that they were regretfully giving up both sets of Games: China, they complained, was currently absorbing all their energies.

  It was a while before the Olympic movement could put aside what Japan did with those energies. When the Summer Games were revived (in London) in 1948 after a twelve-year hiatus, even Japan’s American sponsors failed to finagle the country an invitation. The Chicagoan head of the IOC, Avery Brundage, was a great enthusiast for Japanese art. But as he told a countryman in GHQ’s Civil Information and Education Section in 1947, ‘the English are very badly off … and it would be very harmful to all concerned if there were demonstrations during the Games due to the presence of Germans and Japanese’.

  Japanese athletes instead made their return to Olympic sport at the 1952 Summer Games in Helsinki. That same year, just a few weeks after the Occupation officially ended, work began on a bid for the 1960 Games. In the end, Tokyo won the 1964 Games, the grand announcement early in 1959 firing the starting gun on a five-year race to be ready. As the organizers were only too well aware, the flipside of this unprecedented promotional opportunity was the unprecedented potential for embarrassing yourself – via the international media in the run-up to the Games, then amongst an estimated 120,000 foreign visitors once the Games began. Two billion dollars and a superhuman organizational effort were invested in making sure that didn’t happen, right down to a citizen spring-cleaning of the city – involving more than a million people – and warnings against spitting or urinating in the street, or even using one’s car horn unnecessarily.

  For the British former Olympic athlete and sports journalist Chris Brasher, arriving in Tokyo at the end of September 1964, it was clear that Japan had defied the doubters. Contrary to expectations, the country was ready and the city was polished to a sheen – though not, he was pleased to see, to the detriment of its traditional charms. Having just read Ian Fleming’s well-timed Japanese Bond thriller, You Only Live Twice, on the long flight over, Brasher was delighted to discover when he landed that Tokyo’s famous ‘kamikaze taxi drivers’ had not been tamed by their changed surroundings: mile after mile of brand new highways, marked out with bright white lines, passing through new tunnels and ducking underneath twisting new expressways. His driver possessed so much of the old spirit, in fact – ‘boring straight at a bus’ – that Brasher began to wonder whether he would live long enough to see the Games.

  The new Olympic architecture was a boon to an otherwise ‘ugly’ city, thought Brasher. Most impressive of all to him was the National Gymnasium, with its skin of steel and concrete draped between two tall masts. The Olympic Village had also been well thought out: adapted from US military housing, it offered greenery and calm just a ‘javelin’s throw’ from the main stadiums and was free of the dust usually left around Olympic accommodation when it was thrown up at the last minute. Japan seemed to be getting everything right. Even when the Olympic Village was hit by a typhoon and then a minor earthquake, Brasher remained unshaken in his faith that the ‘hard work, humility and charm’ of his hosts would see things through.

  At the opening ceremony, a capacity crowd of 75,000 people packed into the National Stadium were treated to what Brasher breathlessly claimed must be ‘the most brilliantly organized spectacle ever held in international sport’. A group of young girls and boys drummed the Olympic flag into the stadium, before a young man, born the day of the Hiroshima bomb, ascended 160 steps up to an enormous urn waiting to be lit. Sakai Yoshinori’s great moment would previously have been shared with the world by flying videotapes out to various national broadcasters. This time, the images captured by three television cameras suspended from bamboo poles were beamed across to Europe and North America live and in colour via satellite,
thanks to a technological tie-up between NASA, the Japanese government and Japan’s national broadcaster NHK.

  There was space-age technology on the ground too. Nine days before the opening ceremony, a brand-new train system had opened for business: the shinkansen (‘new trunk line’). On its first day of operation, the world’s fastest train carried more than 36,000 passengers along the Tōkaidō Line, named after the ancient travel route running from Edo to Osaka via Yokohama and Kyoto. Back when the Meiji Emperor had left Kyoto for Edo, the journey time along that road had been around a fortnight via palanquin. The first train service, in 1889, had cut the journey time between Osaka and Tokyo to sixteen and a half hours. Now, the shinkansen took four.

  As with the Games, not everyone in Japan had thought the shinkansen a sensible way to spend money. A senior executive at Japan National Railways (JNR) described it in 1963 as the ‘height of madness … meaningless and destined to fail’. The disruption of laying brand-new track was enormous. A few enterprising people hurriedly built houses along the route, the better to benefit from government compensation money when they were torn down again. But around 50,000 bona fide families were also evicted in the building of the Tōkaidō Line alone. And where existing railway stations couldn’t be enlarged, because built-up areas around them made it too expensive, a generation of new – ‘Shin’ – stations appeared. Osakans wondered why the money had been found to expand Tokyo Station, while at their end of the line some of the time saved using the shinkansen was lost again changing trains between Osaka and Shin-Osaka.

  And yet the people leading the development thought of themselves as the ‘dream team’. They were bringing to fruition an abandoned pre-war project to knit a country – and, back then, its empire – closer together through faster travel. In the 1930s, Japan’s media had dubbed it the dangan ressha or ‘bullet train’ – a reference to its promised speed, though the line was also intended to carry ordnance to war zones.