Morita, Akio

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MORITA, AKIO

Akio Morita (1921–), as a co-founder and later chairman of the Sony Corporation, gave to the general public a revolutionary array of inventive electronic products during the last half of the twentieth century. Worldwide, he introduced consumers to products like the hand-held transistor radio, the video cassette recorder (VCR), the Walkman portable cassette player, and the Diskman portable CD disk player. He not only became one of the most influential businessmen in the world, he also helped to establish Japan's reputation after World War II (1939–1945) as a source for high quality, innovative, and reliable products.

Morita was born in 1921, the first son of Kyusaemon and Shuko Morita, in the small Japanese village of Kosugaya. If Morita had followed in the traditional family occupation of his father and his ancestors, he would have been the fifteenth generation heir to his family's 300 year-old sake brewing business, manufacturing an alcoholic beverage made from fermented rice and widely used by the Japanese.

The young Morita, however, was not interested in the family business. He instead developed a passion for improving electronics and sound reproduction. Presumably he was influenced early in his life by his mother's love for Western classical music, which she imported into the household with American-made RCA Victrola records. Recordings were then made out of heavy, clumsy, and easily-broken 12-inch diameter discs, imprinted with fine grooves that had to be tracked by a tiny needle as the discs revolved at 78 revolutions per minute. The sound quality was crude, and the music was often mixed with the sounds of scratches which inevitably accumulated on the discs after use.

Morita became so interested in new electronics, and with improving the qualities of sound, that he almost flunked out of school because of his disinterest in anything other than electronics. His family convinced him to persist in his studies, and he later entered the prestigious Eighth Higher School as a physics major.

Rather than be drafted into World War II (1939–1945), Morita entered Osaka Imperial University, agreeing to serve in the navy after graduation. In 1944 he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the engineering corps of the Japanese Imperial Navy. He worked on projects involving guided weapons and night-vision gun sights. There he met with Masura Ibuka, a brilliant electronics engineer 13 years his senior. They became best friends and together eventually co-founded Sony Corporation.

After World War II, Morita and Ibuka created the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation with only $500. Begun with 20 employees and a shared rented office in a burned-out Tokyo department store, the company made electronic equipment—amplifiers, voltage-measuring devices, and communication devices—for the Japanese Post Office. It was the beginning of an electronics revolution, and an electronics empire.

The business grew slowly, but in 1953, Morita decided to buy the rights to the transistor, a miniature electronics circuit that had been developed by the American company Bell Laboratories. The patent was owned by another American company, Western Electric. At that time, transistors were thought to be impractical for most consumer products, except for use in hearing aids. Morita's purchase of the patent would prove to be the basis for a revolution in modern consumer electronics. With this patent, Morita and Ibuka began to use the transistor in ways that transformed the world of electronics, sound, and television. Within two years, the partners created for commercial consumer use the AM transistor radio. In another two years, they began to produce the pocket-sized transistor radio, the AM-FM transistor radio, the first all-transistor television set, the all-transistor video tape recorder, and the small-screen portable battery-operated television set.

In 1958 Morita changed his company's name to Sony Corporation, because it was easy to pronounce, and Morita himself moved to New York City to set up an office for United States operations. Sony became the first foreign-owned business to offer stock for sale in the United States; in 1970, Sony became the first Japanese company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

During the 1960s and 1970s the Sony Corporation continued to introduce to the public several new transistorized inventions: the first inexpensively priced home video recorder, the color video tape recorder, video tape for color video recording, and the first battery-operated portable video recorder and camera. All of these inventions came to the marketplace produced with extremely high quality. Morita's business helped changed the reputation of Japanese businesses for making cheap, poor-quality consumer items. The Sony brand name stood for the creation of transistorized innovations of all kinds, for high quality, and for reliable consumer products. Morita felt he had, among other things, taken the shame out of the label "Made in Japan."

Morita had indeed realized his childhood dream to improve the quality of sound reproduction. The use of CD digital technology eliminated the old-fashioned records his mother used and replaced the scratchy-sounding vinyl discs with a CD technology that reproduced sound almost flawlessly. The Sony Corporation, with Morita's genius for innovation and selling, created an entirely new electronics environment during the last half of the twentieth century.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Morita wrote two books dealing with careers in business and international business trade: Made in Japan (1986) and The Japan That Can Say No (1991). In 1994, Morita retired from the Sony Corporation at age 73, after suffering a debilitating stroke which had confined him to a wheel chair.

See also: Sony Corporation