Made In Japan Read online

  My mother changed many traditions in our family. Although she came from a samurai family on one side and was aware of the traditions—she always wore kimono—she was also willing to accept new ways. Of course we children did a fair amount of arguing and fighting, but as I grew older, actually even before my teens, I withdrew to the study of my own interests and I relied on her more and more for advice. She was in charge of our home, completely, and she gave me a room of my own with a desk. I got a second desk when I started my experiments, because I needed a workbench. She also bought me a bed, so I didn’t have to use quilted bedding on the tatami mats as most others in the house did. I was being modernized even as a child. My mother and father wanted it that way because 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.

  It has been customary in our family that when the son takes over as family head he abandons his given name and assumes the traditional given name, Kyuzaemon. Most of the first sons for fifteen generations have alternatively been given at birth the first names Tsunesuke or Hikotaro. My father was Hikotaro Morita until he assumed the role of head of the family and became the fourteenth Kyuzaemon. His father, who was born Tsunesuke Morita, became Kyuzaemon Morita when he took over, and when he retired and passed the duties and responsibilities to my father, Kyuzaemon took another first name, Nobuhide Morita.

  But when I was born, my father thought the name waiting for me, Tsunesuke, was too old-fashioned for the twentieth century, so he called on a venerable Japanese scholar of Chinese lore and literature for advice on naming me. This man was a renowned scholar, and a friend of my grandfather, and he recommended the name Akio, which uses the character for “enlightened,” pronounced “aki.” The character also appeared in my grandfather’s name. Chinese characters usually have more than one pronunciation, and some have dozens, and so my first name could be read to mean enlightened or uncommon, and coupled with Morita, which means “prosperous rice field,” it seemed an optimistic and hopeful identity to carry through life. My parents liked my name very much and used the syllable in the given names of both of my brothers, Masaaki and Kazuaki. Imperial reigns in Japan are given era names, and years in the official calendar are counted from one at the beginning of each era. When Hirohito became emperor after the death of his father in 1926, the imperial family consulted the same famous scholar of Chinese in seeking an auspicious name for his reign. He named the era “Showa,” meaning “enlightened peace,” using the same character as the “aki” in my name, but pronounced “sho.” (The year 1986 is officially known as Showa 61, the sixty-first year of this imperial era called Showa.)

  My family has suggested to me that I should really take the name Kyuzaemon now. It is possible to go into family court and have your name changed if you can prove the historical precedent, but I think it would not be wise for me, because so many people know me as Akio all over the world. But I sometimes sign my name with the initials AKM, which could mean Akio Kyuzaemon Morita, and I have a personalized license plate on the Lincoln Continental I keep in the United States, AKM-15. One day my first son, Hideo, will take over as head of the family, but whether he will become Kyuzaemon or not is up to him, although my wife and I would like him to do it. But that is really getting ahead of my story.

  I was made aware of my family tradition and my ancestors from early childhood. My family was blessed with men of culture and lovers of art, like my grandfather and his father. They were also civic leaders and officials of our village going back to the era of the Tokugawa Shogunate, in the seventeenth century. They were an elite, and they were accorded the privilege in those days of using a surname and carrying a sword. Whenever my parents would take me back to Kosugaya for a visit or just a day’s trip, the people there would fuss over me and build up my ego.

  My father’s great-grandfather, the eleventh Kyuzae-mon, liked new things and new ideas and during the Meiji era, before the beginning of this century, he invited a Frenchman to Japan to help him with an idea he had of growing grapes and making wine. He had a name picked out and was excited about producing Western-style wine as well as sake. Japan was opening to the world then after over two hundred and fifty years of self-imposed seclusion. New things were in vogue and Emperor Meiji was encouraging the Japanese to learn from the West, especially Western lifestyles and technologies. In Tokyo they were holding formal ballroom dances, and people were emulating European clothing and hairstyles and trying Western food, even at the palace.

  There were other reasons for trying to produce wine. The government of Emperor Meiji foresaw a coming rice shortage, and rice was the basis of sake. The planting of vineyards, and substitution of wine for sake, where possible, would make it easier to withstand the rice harvest shortfalls that some were predicting. Historians also say the government was looking for employment for many samurai warriors who were out of work under the new government. We had a large amount of farmland, and so in 1880, with the encouragement of the Meiji government, the grape root stock was brought from France and planted there. My ancestor installed a machine for processing the grapes and built proper winery facilities, importing people from nearby areas to work the vineyards. Four years later a small amount of wine was produced, and hopes were raised that this new industry could flourish. But it was not to be.

  This was the time when the French vineyards were being devastated, first by the oidium mildew and then by the disastrous phylloxera, small licelike insects that attacked the vines. Apparently the root stock that was brought from France was infected, and despite all the elaborate preparations the project was a failure. Phylloxera were found in Kyuzaemon’s vineyards in 1885, and the vines had to be destroyed. Kyuzaemon had to sell the land to pay off his debts. The vineyards were converted to mulberry fields, for silkworm cultivation. But other traditional Morita products, such as soy sauce and sake, found their way to a Paris international exposition in 1899, and one of them won a gold medal, a very impressive thing for a Japanese company in those days. Anyway, this ancestor of mine had the eagerness to try something new and had the courage and strength not to give up if a single project failed. His predecessor as family head had started a beer business by hiring a Chinese brewmaster who had learned his trade in England. He also founded a baking company, now called Pasco, which prospered and today has overseas branches. Tenacity, perseverance, and optimism are traits that have been handed down to me through the family genes. I think my father recognized this in me.

  My father’s great-grandfather died in 1894, and in 1918 a bronze statue of him was put up in Kosugaya in recognition of the service he gave to the community. He had used his own money to build roads and make other community improvements and did so many other good works that Emperor Meiji, who once visited the vicinity of our little village, decorated him. Unfortunately, during the war the statue was melted down for use in the war effort, but a mold was taken and a porcelain bust was made, which still stands in a wooded area in front of a shrine in Kosugaya.

  Although our family history seems to revolve around Kosugaya, my parents moved from the quiet little village to the city of Nagoya, the capital of our prefecture, and I was born there on January 26, 1921. The move to Nagoya, a bustling industrial city, which was the capital of Aichi Prefecture, was part of father’s campaign to modernize the Morita company and instill a new spirit in the old firm. Besides, the city was a more convenient place from which to run a modern business than a charming little countryside village. So I grew up in the city rather than in the tiny village of my ancestors, although we still consider our roots to be in Kosugaya.

  Recently we discovered many of the ancient records of the village in our family’s storehouses, and we have found them so interesting that I have formed a foundation for the preservation and study of this library of historical documents. The material is all very detailed and tells a great deal about rural life in Japan three hundred years ago from a very practical point o
f view. We have catalogued these records and delivered bound copies of the catalogue to major libraries and universities in Japan. We have built a glassed-in enclosure to cover the old storehouses and a three-story building as part of the same structure, where scholars now come to study the documents, which we still keep in their original place in the storehouses. I have often thought that if I ever retire I can spend many more busy years studying history and working with those historical records in Kosugaya.

  My father was quite generous in his treatment of me, but I was, after all, carrying the first son’s burden, and he was determined to give me a business education starting very early in life. Father was conditioned by the times, and because, as the family’s eldest son, he had had to give up his schooling to rescue the family fortunes, he remained a very practical, and I think conservative—almost too conservative, I thought at the time—businessman when it came to making decisions on new ventures or doing things out of the ordinary. He seemed to take too long to make a decision, and he was always worrying about something. Sometimes I thought he worried that he didn’t have anything to worry about. I often quarreled with him about some of the obligations that fell to me, and I think he liked these little disputes as a way of bringing me out, getting me to reason and to try to present arguments logically. He even turned my anger into training. As I got older, I continued to disagree with him often about his conservatism, but it served the family well. And in contrast to his serious and cautious business personality, he was a warm and generous father. He spent all his leisure time with his children, and I have many fond memories of my father teaching us how to swim and fish and hike.

  But business was business to him, and there was not much fun involved. When I was as young as ten or eleven, I was first taken to the company office and the sake brewery. I was shown how the business was run, and I had to sit at my father’s side through long and boring board meetings. But I was taught how to talk to people who work for you, and I learned while I was still in elementary school something about what goes on in business discussions. Since my father was the boss, he could call his managers to our home for reports and for conferences, and he would always insist that I listen in. After a while I got to enjoy it.

  I was always told, “You are the boss from the start. You are the eldest son in the family. Remember that.” I was not allowed to forget that I was to be my father’s successor in the top management of our company and the head of our household one day. I think it was very important that I was also cautioned time and again as a young man, “Don’t think that because you are at the top you can boss others around. Be very clear on what you have decided to do and what you ask others to do and take full responsibility for it.” I was taught that scolding subordinates and looking for people to blame for problems—seeking scapegoats—is useless. The proper thing, to the Japanese way of thinking that I was taught at home, is to make use of the motivations you share with people to accomplish something that will be to the advantage of both. Everybody wants to succeed. In learning to work with employees, I discovered, a manager needs to cultivate the traits of patience and understanding. You can’t make selfish moves or get mean with people. These concepts have stayed with me and helped me develop the philosophy of management that served me very well in the past and continues to serve me and my company today.

  My family was also guided by family precepts stemming from our Buddhist religion. The family was devout, and we held the usual religious services at home. We children would be handed a book of sutras and would be required to try to read the complicated characters along with the adults. I wouldn’t say I am a religious man, but these customs and traditions have been important in my family and we still adhere to them. In later years, when we would go home to visit my father and mother, we would always first go to the family altar and bow to it before doing anything.

  As a young boy in middle school, my holidays were consumed by business, business, business. My father would take me to the office when he had a meeting and I would sit through it, or listen when reports were made to him. Then there was inventory. We used to call it stock-checking, and we used the ancient, traditional, and very accurate way of doing it: we would go into the plant, with the president of the company looking over our shoulders, and count everything. Then there was the sake-tasting from the barrels in midwinter to check its development in the complicated maturing and refining process. I often had to go along. I was taught to inspect the brewing process, then take a small sip of sake to get the flavor, and then spit it out. I never developed a taste for anything alcoholic despite this, or maybe because of it.

  Although my father was by nature a very conservative person, he wanted his family to have the things they needed and desired. He was always interested in new, imported technologies and foreign products. When the family still lived in Kosugaya, he started a taxi and bus service there by importing a Ford touring car. For the first company driver, he chose the man who pulled the jinriksha, the two-wheeled, man-powered taxi that was then quite common in Japan. In my childhood recollections, I remember Sunday outings, riding in an open Model T or Model A Ford, bumping along the rutted, narrow, and dusty roads at a very slow speed, my mother sitting in the back seat in a very dignified and stately way holding her parasol upright to shade her from the sun. Later, father used to go to work in his chauffeur-driven Buick. At home we had a General Electric washing machine and a Westinghouse refrigerator.

  But even though the family was to some degree Westernized, I think the first really strong foreign influence in my life was my Uncle Keizo, who came home from Paris after about four years abroad and brought the first truly Western wind into our house. He was very sophisticated, much more than any of us. Even before he came, I was never required to wear kimono, and my father wore Western clothing at work and changed into traditional dress at home; even his father often wore Western clothing. My grandfather was intrigued by the West—he liked American movies, and I remember he took me to see Kong when I was a very small boy. But Uncle Keizo brought a personal account of the outside world to us, and we were all intrigued. He brought back his paintings of Paris, photographs of France, and pictures taken on his trips to London and New York, and he also showed us films he had taken with a Pathe movie camera, which used 9.5-millimeter film. He owned a Renault car in Paris, which he drove himself, and had pictures to prove it. Although I was only eight years old, it made such an impression on me that I learned all the foreign words I could—Place de la Concorde, Montmartre, Coney Island. When he told us about Coney Island, I was fascinated, and years later, on my very first trip to New York in 1953,1 went to Coney Island on my first Sunday because of his stories. I had a wonderful time; I rode the roller coaster and even tried the parachute drop.

  My father followed the example of his father. He used to say that all the money in the world cannot give a person education unless that person is willing to sit down by himself and study hard. But money can provide one kind of education, the education you can get by travel. That is what happened with my uncle, who came home and set up his atelier in our house and stayed with us for a long time until he got married. My grandfather supported him those four years he was studying abroad. Years later my father would give me money to travel on my high school vacations, and with a schoolmate I visited many places in Japan. We had a relative in Korea, which had been under Japanese occupation since 1904 and was annexed to Japan in 1910, and I visited there, and after Korea I went as far as Manchuria—I even rode on the first all air-conditioned, streamlined train, which was called “the Asia,” in 1939 or 1940, and my next trip would have been to the United States, but the war postponed that trip for more than a decade.

  At home we were an unusually modern family. My mother was very fond of Western classical music, and she bought many phonograph records for our old Victrola. My grandfather often took her to concerts, and I believe my interest in electronics and sound reproduction began because of her. We would listen to the scratchy-sounding recordings of
the great music masters of Europe over and over again from the big horn speaker. With the kind of mechanical recording equipment that was available to the makers in those days, it was difficult to reproduce the sound of a full orchestra, so the best records were vocals and instrumental solos. My mother was very fond of Enrico Caruso and the violinist Efrem Zimbalist, as I recall. Whenever famous artists came to Nagoya, we always went to hear them. I remember hearing the great Russian basso, Feodor Chaliapin, and the German pianist Wilhelm Kempff, who was then a very young man. In those days one local record shop owner imported Victor Red Seal classical records, and each month when a new shipment arrived he would send one of each title to my mother on approval. I can still remember cranking the old mechanical player vigorously when I was just a small kid. Then, when I was in junior high school, an electric phonograph was imported to Japan from the United States and it was inevitable that we would get one.

  My father thought that if you liked music you should have good sound. Besides, he told us later, he was worried that listening to that tinny-sounding Victrola would be bad for our ears and our musical appreciation. He didn’t understand or appreciate music from an artistic or technical standpoint, but he wanted his family to have the best possible chance to hear the music as it was played. He felt that the only way a person could learn to appreciate good music and good sound was by listening to the best sound that was available. So when the first new phonographs arrived, he spent a lot of money to buy one of the first in Japan, or at least the first in our locality. I remember that the new machine, also a Victor, cost an incredible amount—six hundred yen. In those days you could buy a Japanese automobile for only fifteen hundred yen.