• “I was having lunch with my navy colleagues when the incredible news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima arrived. The information was sketchy - we were not even told what kind of bomb had been dropped - but as a technical officer just out of college with a degree in physics, I understood what the bomb was and what it meant to Japan, and to me. The future had never been more uncertain - Japan had never lost a war - and only a young man could be optimistic. Yet I had confidence in myself and in my future even then.” - woah - “We didn't know how horrible an atomic weapon could be, but I had seen the terrible results of conventional firebombing, and, in fact, I was in Tokyo just after the night of March 9-10, when the incendiary bombs from wave after wave of B-29's had whipped up a firestorm that killed one hundred thousand people in just a few hours. I had also seen the horror of the bombing of Nagoya, my hometown. Parts of all of Japan's major industrial cities, with the exception of Kyoto, were charred wastelands in 1945, depressing heaps of blackened remains: the homes of millions of Japanese. That an atomic bomb could be worse was almost unimaginable.” - “After Hiroshima and the second atomic bombing at Nagasaki, it was brought home to me more than ever that Japan would need all the talent it could save for the future. I don't mind saying that even then, as a young man, I felt that somehow I had a role to play in that future. I didn't know how big a role it would turn out to be.” - intro
• Akio Morita started SONY in the rubble of post-WW2 Japan, determined to make Japan known as a country of high quality products. Throughout SONY’s growth, he was always on the leading edge of analog to digital technology, pioneering fundamental breakthroughs across audio, video, and TV formats. Akio Morita was also Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs, creating many of the genius marketing tactics that Jobs would later use to market Apple products…

Obsessed with Music Phonographs as a Kid

• “I was born the first son and fifteenth-generation heir to one of Japan's finest and oldest sake-brewing families. The sake of Japan is not only the national drink but also a cultural symbol to the Japanese people. It is even a part of many religious rituals - at traditional marriage ceremonies the couple shares a cup of sake. The Morita family of Kosugaya village, near the industrial city of Nagoya, has been making sake for three hundred years under the brand name "Nenohimatsu." - Akio Morita’s destiny was to join the generational family business - “They were grooming me to carry on as the heir to the family business and as the next head of the Morita family, literally the fifteenth Morita to take the name Kyuzaemon.”
• The problem was that growing up in a wealthy family, he got to experience high-quality music through phonographs and became obsessed: “I was obsessed with this new discovery and all the questions it raised in my mind. I had a relative who was an engineer, and when I heard that he had built an electric phonograph by himself I was eager to see it. I went to his house and he demonstrated it to me. It was in components, all wired together and strung out on the straw mat floor of his house. It seemed marvelous that things like this could be built by amateurs, not only by big factories. In fact, making radios was becoming a popular hobby, and some newspapers and magazines would run columns with diagrams and parts lists and instructions to show their readers how to do it. This was something I had to do.” → Immediately experimenting as a kid just like Ed Thorp & Danny Meyer: “I began to buy books about electronics, and I subscribed to Japanese and foreign magazines that contained all the latest information about sound reproduction and radio. Soon I was spending so much time on electronics that it was hurting my schoolwork. I was devoting nearly all my after-school hours to my new hobby, making electric devices from the diagrams in a Japanese magazine called Wireless and Experiments. My dream was to build an electric phonograph and make a recording of my own voice. I kept expanding my experiments as I learned more and more about the new technology. I had to teach myself because the subjects I was really interested in were not taught in my school in those days. But I managed to build a crude electric phonograph and a radio receiver on my own. I even made a crude recording of my voice and played it back on my electric phonograph.”

Meeting his Co-Founder Ibuka

• Akio soon found a mentor to study under in college: “Professor Asada was very serious about applied science, and among the things he was working on was light beam telephone transmission, using high-pressure mercury lamps. He could demonstrate how very high-intensity light beams could be modulated by audio frequency. I wanted to study with this brilliant, confident, and surprisingly relaxed and jovial scientist.” → Unfortunately just as he was making a name for himself, he had to permanently join the Navy to avoid an uncertain military assignment during WW2
• “I belonged to a special project group composed of researchers from the army, navy, and civilian sector, all working on heat-seeking devices. We were brainstorming the challenge, with the task of being original and audacious in our thinking. One of the civilian representatives in our group was a brilliant electronics engineer who was in charge of his own company in those days, a man who was destined to have a great deal of influence in my life. Masaru Ibuka is thirteen years my senior, but he was to become my very close friend, colleague, partner, and co-founder of the company we would create: the Sony Corporation… Mr. Ibuka's contribution to this group was significant. He had devised a powerful amplifier at his company, the Japan Measuring Instrument Company, which was being used in a device that could detect a submarine thirty meters below the surface of the water by measuring any disturbance in the earth's magnetic flux. The unit was suspended from an airplane, and its key part was Ibuka's amplifier, which was powerful enough to detect and amplify a very small frequency of only one or two cycles per second to around six hundred cycles” (he ends up meeting his cofounder Ibuka during this time!)

The War was Over

• “By July the bombing had destroyed or badly damaged half of the industrial buildings in Nagoya, and statistics released sometime later said that 32 percent of the population had been "de-housed" in the firebombing. It was simply not safe for civilians, so many people who did not have to be in the city moved away, like my parents. The bombing caused millions of people to flee. Actually, Nagoya suffered less than Yokohama, where 69 percent of the population was homeless, or Kobe, where the number was 58 percent, or Tokyo, with 46 percent” - total destruction - “Although the people of Japan had never before heard his voice, we knew it was the emperor. He spoke in the highly mannered old-fashioned language of the court, and even though we couldn't follow the words exactly, we knew what the message was, what he was telling us, and we were frightened and yet relieved. The war was over.”
• After the war Akio was able to get a job teaching physics in Tokyo and reconnected with his mentor Ibuka, who was working on a new idea: “He had a more intriguing idea: since shortwave receivers were strictly prohibited during the war, a keen interest had developed in listening to shortwave broadcasts. Now that it was no longer illegal, perhaps the demand could be met. Ibuka figured out a way. Because the radio was very important for hearing air raid warnings and getting other information during the war, people had taken very good care of their radios, but they could only receive medium-wave band, regular AM broadcasts. So Ibuka designed a shortwave adapter unit consisting of a small wooden box and a simple radio circuit that required only one vacuum tube. This could be attached to any standard radio very simply and would convert the unit to shortwave reception. The employees had to scrounge through the black market to get the tubes, some of which were very expensive, but the product became very popular and it gave all the people at Tokyo Tsushin Kenkyusho a boost of confidence.” (shortwave seems to be for voice rather than commercial announcements…)

Getting His Father’s Blessing

• Immediately Akio reached out that he wants to be involved, so they set out on the tough task of convincing his dad to release him from family duties: “In Japan, it was considered a serious thing to take a son, especially a first son, out of his home and family environment and bring him permanently into a new atmosphere in the world of business. In some cases, it was almost as though an adoption were taking place… After our socializing, Ibuka and Maeda told my father about the new venture and what they hoped to accomplish and they said that I was absolutely needed in the new business. When they had finished, we all waited tensely for a response. Father was obviously prepared for the moment. With very little hesitation, he said that he expected me to succeed him as head of the family and had also expected me to take over the family business. Then he turned to Maeda and Ibuka and said, "But if my son wants to do something else to develop himself or utilize his capabilities, he should do it." He looked at me and smiled. "You are going to do what you like best," he said. I was delighted.” → they now were able to start the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company
• As you can imagine, he had to persevere through some rough conditions early on… “We could see bomb damage wherever we looked. There were leaks in the roof and we literally had to open umbrellas over our desks sometimes… When some of my relatives came to see me, they were so shocked by the shabby conditions that they thought I had become an anarchist and they said so to my mother. They could not understand how, if I was not a radical, I could choose to work in a place like that when I could have been in Nagoya, living as befitted my "station" as the son of the president of a long-established company.” (startups require sacrifices)

Experimenting with the Tape Recorder