Made In Japan Read online

  The new period of peace was strange. The bombers did not come anymore, but many cities looked as though there was nothing more to bomb. In the heart of cities such as Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, and Tokyo, only the sturdy concrete or stone buildings remained. Flimsy houses, shops, and factories made of wood and paper had burned like dry tinder under a shower of incendiary bombs dropped in huge clusters by the B-29’s. The firebreaks cut through certain neighborhoods to contain the damage had been useless because the winds and flying embers easily leaped over them. In Tokyo, less than half of the prewar population of seven million remained in the city after the bombings started. Nearly four million had gone to the countryside or to smaller cities. The calamity was worse than the earthquake of 1923 for Tokyo, but the devastation by fire was similar, so some Tokyoites had seen their city destroyed twice in their lifetime.

  At the end of the war, only 10 percent of the city’s streetcars were running. There were only sixty buses in running condition and just a handful of automobiles and trucks. Most had been converted to run on charcoal and wood when liquid fuels ran out. Sickness was rampant and the tuberculosis rate was somewhere about 22 percent. Hospitals were short of everything, including bandages, cotton, and disinfectants. Department store shelves were empty or held a lot of useless unsold goods like violin bows and unstrung tennis rackets. Some movie theaters were still open and showing films, and they were crowded with people who had nothing to do and nowhere to go and wanted to divert their minds from their misery for a couple of hours.

  The Morita family was fortunate because we had lost no one in the war and the company offices and factory in Nagoya, and even our home, survived with no serious bombing damage. After the first few days of reunion and relaxation, we began discussing the future, and particularly mine, as the eldest son. Father was still very healthy and robust and in charge of the business, and there really wasn’t any need for me at the Morita company at the time. During the war the factory had continued to operate on war work, producing powdered miso and alcohol, and so the business was in working condition. I made some suggestions for improvements while I was home, but there was no direct need for me at the factory—it had enough managers with my father and his regular staff. Besides, I was only twenty-four and everybody agreed there would be plenty of time for me to move into the company later.

  During my first few weeks at home, I received a letter from Professor Hattori, the physics teacher who had been such a good adviser to me in higher school. He said he had moved to the physics department at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and he was helping to create a special school for demobilized students whose science education had been cut short by the war. His problem was a shortage of teachers, and he invited me—urged me strongly—to join the faculty. I thought it was a great idea because it would keep me in physics and would get me to Tokyo, where I hoped I could find other possibilities for interesting work now that the navy and the entire Japanese military establishment had been abolished. I got my parents’ agreement to take the teaching job, and luckily, while I was still at home, I managed to reestablish contact again with Ibuka, the brilliant engineer I had worked with on the research project team. He was opening a new lab in Tokyo.

  I had been in touch with Ibuka infrequently in those last few months of the war. As the war was coming to an end, it became more and more difficult for him to get to our villa because he had moved his factory to Nagano Prefecture, several hours northwest of Tokyo by train, because the Tokyo factory and lab were located in a target area where there were many small factories. He traveled to my lab in Zushi for meetings many times, but I had also made trips to the apple orchard in Nagano where his new factory was located. One day in Nagano I began talking to Ibuka about what we would do after the war when I realized we both knew from listening to shortwave radio that the war was lost.

  Ibuka had other inside information. His father-in-law was Tamon Maeda, a right-hand man of Prince Fumimaro Konoe. Konoe had been prime minister of Japan several times and had fought against the military clique that eventually dominated the government and plunged Japan into war. Maeda was later picked as Japan’s first postwar minister of education but was caught in one of the purges six months later and forced to resign because he had been associated with wartime government officials. Near the end of the war, Maeda lost his Tokyo home in the bombing and moved to the mountain resort town of Karuizawa, not too far from Nagano. Ibuka visited him there often. In those meetings he learned a lot about what was happening diplomatically and militarily.

  The company that Ibuka ran was called Nihon Sokuteiki, or Japan Measuring Instrument Company, and its factory in Nagano Prefecture employed fifteen hundred people making small mechanical elements that controlled the frequency of radar devices. These devices had to oscillate at exactly one thousand cycles per second, and Ibuka had the ingenious idea of hiring music students, who had a fine sense of pitch, to check the accuracy of the elements against a simple one thousand-cycle tuning fork. I mention this as an example of the freshness and inventiveness of his mind, which so much impressed me and made me want to work with this man.

  But Ibuka didn’t feel professionally satisfied out there in the countryside, merely producing components in large quantity. Ibuka told Taiji Uemura, who was president of his company, that he wanted to move back to Tokyo, and Uemura reluctantly let him go and then offered to help set him up in business. Ibuka had another friend who owned what was left of a department store in Tokyo called Shirokiya, at Nihonbashi, which was literally in the bombed-out heart of Tokyo. The building had been a target because there was a vacuum tube factory underground.

  In this empty and bare old building, set among the rubble and devastation, the burned-out homes and shops of the once-prosperous downtown area of Tokyo, Ibuka started Tokyo Tsushin Kenkyusho, or Tokyo Telecommunications Research Laboratories, with seven employees from the old Tokyo factory who had previously moved with him to Nagano. They squeezed into the old telephone operator’s room on the third floor of the building and later used space on the seventh floor. Ibuka once told me that the rest of the employees who had moved from Tokyo originally didn’t want to return because there were few places to live in Tokyo and food was scarce. They also knew that there was very little money in the company’s coffers then and that there was, at best, a very uncertain future for the new company.

  Ibuka’s resources were all in his own pocket and in his head. (There was a trickle of cash coming in from the sale of voltmeters made by his old company.) The small group sat in conference in the depressing surroundings of the burned-out department store, and for weeks they tried to figure out what kind of business this new company could enter in order to make money to operate. In those days, only the black market prospered, and it was the only place to get certain components. The major old, established electronics companies were getting started and had little interest in selling parts to a competitor. Ibuka’s idea was to build something new, but first the company had to establish a financial base. Many strange ideas were suggested in the early conferences. For example, one member of the team said that since most of central Tokyo had been burned out and was leveled, the company should lease some vacant land and open a miniature golf course. The people needed some entertainment, they reasoned. The movie theaters were crowded to capacity in those days. Everybody needed some escape. Another suggested that the food business was a sure money-earner and that perhaps sweet bean paste cakes would be a good line.

  Actually, food was on everybody’s mind, and so the group finally decided to work on a simple rice cooker, but they never perfected it, although they made many experimental models. The device was a simple wooden tub with spiral-shaped electrodes in the bottom. It depended on the conductivity of the wet rice to complete the electrical circuit and heat up the rice. The idea was that when the rice was cooked and began to dry, conductivity would be lost, the electrical circuit would automatically be cut, and the owner could sit down to dinner. But consistent results were never possi
ble. Ibuka and his staff tried eating the stuff, but sometimes it would be overcooked and sometimes undercooked. They gave it up. They even thought of a bread-baking device based on the same principle of conductivity—the wet dough closing the circuit between the metal ends of a wooden box—but never really produced one. Finally, the wives were put to work helping to produce heating pads, stitching the wires to the cloth. The pads were popular in the street markets and brought in some badly needed cash to the families of the company employees.

  But Ibuka hadn’t made his move to Tokyo to go into the entertainment or food business or to sell homemade heating pads. 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.

  Maeda had a friend on Japan’s biggest newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun, and this man, Ryuzo Kaji, wrote a regular column called, literally, “Blue Pencil.” The Asahi newspaper in those days consisted of only one sheet because of the lack of newsprint, but the article on October 6, 1945, gave the new company some generous promotion:

  There is welcome news about how receivers some people may already have in their homes can be simply modified to pick up shortwave signals. Mr. Masaru Ibuka, a former lecturer at Waseda University’s department of science and engineering and son-in-law of Minister of Education Tamon Maeda, recently put up a sign for the Tokyo Telecommunications Research Laboratory on the third floor of Shirokiya in Nihonbashi. From noncommercial motives, he has set out to spread the use of shortwave receivers by the conversion of regular receivers or by the use of an additional device. With the fairly high-class super heterodyne receiver, just a simple conversion allows you to turn it into a fine shortwave receiver. With sets one step above this, high frequency shortwave can be received with the implementation of an additional device.

  The article went on to predict that eventually private broadcasts would be permitted by the Occupation authorities and that upgrading existing radios would be essential because of the expected “entanglement of wires” when the many new stations began broadcasting. It suggested that “by using an additional device, boundaries can be extended so that even these are rendered audible.” By way of describing Ibuka, the writer said he “used to manage a weaponry company, but now he wants to make the technology he is so familiar with into something that can be put to good use. He is starting anew as the town’s scholar. He says that he will accept any kind of questions including those regarding the repair of regular receivers.”

  As it turned out, Kaji got just some of it wrong— Ibuka had not been in the weaponry business, and he wasn’t too keen on making repairs to old sets. And, of course, if the business turned out to be noncommercial it was not by choice; Ibuka really needed the money to keep paying his employees. I was fortunate enough to be reading the Nagoya edition of the paper on October 6 and was overjoyed to get the “welcome news” about my old friend Ibuka. I wrote to him immediately and said I would like to visit him in Tokyo. I said I wanted to help him in his new business and would support him any way I could. He wrote back immediately, inviting me to come see him and the new company, but told me that things were pretty tight and that he was paying his people out of his own pocket and was looking for funding.

  I traveled up to Tokyo to take my new teaching job, and after settling myself in a friend’s house on the western rim of Tokyo, where there had been less damage from the bombing than in the central city, I lost no time in looking up my friend Ibuka in Nihon-bashi. Ibuka’s new company headquarters in the almost gutted department store building looked pathetic. But there was enthusiasm on Ibuka’s face, and he and his employees were happy to be working at a time when so few people knew what would become of them.

  Because I knew Ibuka was having trouble meeting his payroll, I got the idea that I could work with this new company part-time and teach part-time. In this way, Ibuka would not have to pay me very much because I would have my teaching salary and we could both make ends meet. Ibuka and I talked for a long time about starting our own company—we had both been thinking about this since soon after we first met— and we finally decided in March 1946 that we would do it when we could get the details worked out. So there I was, a university instructor on the government payroll and a part-time researcher at Ibuka’s new company with plans to form our own new company. We both realized that before we could actually form the new company there was the delicate question of my obligations to my family to be considered. So I joined Ibuka, and Maeda, who had resigned as minister of education, on the night train to Kosugaya in April 1946, where they intended to ask my father to help the new company by allowing me to join. They felt they wanted to demonstrate their courtesy toward my father because they knew what it meant to take a first son out of the family business.

  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. The practice of formally discussing such a plan with the parents is sometimes done today in some business circles, particularly in small enterprises. But even in large companies, family background and recommendations and unspoken pledges of sincerity on both sides are still indicated when a young man joins his business family. The commitments are genuine because they cover a working life, not just casual employment for a few years as in some countries where there is much more worker mobility. I was, indeed, taking on another family and another, different set of responsibilities.

  Our journey had been uncomfortable. There were broken windows in the old railway coach and we had to sit in a blast of cold air, smoke, and soot all the way, but the welcome at the Morita house in Kosugaya was very warm. Ibuka said recently that he still remembers how well my family entertained him and Maeda, “even though it was only with bread—the Morita family owned a bakery and it was beautiful bread—and served with butter and jam and tea.” Even these things were luxuries in the aftermath of the war. There were barely enough of the necessities. Japanese were feeding their smallest children their scarce rice a single grain at a time. Most people had difficulty even getting rice. During the war, people had become accustomed through necessity to mixing barley and even potato with the bit of rice they could get. The war had bankrupted and demoralized the nation and millions were struggling through those last days at a bare subsistence level.

  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. Ibuka was astounded. He told me later, “I thought it would be harder to get you.” My younger brother. Kazuaki, who was then studying at Waseda University in Tokyo, volunteered to take over as the sake brewer of the Morita family when the time came for fat
her to retire. There were smiles all around. Everyone was relieved and happy.

  Back in Tokyo we pooled our resources for the establishment of our new company, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, or Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company—it came to about five hundred dollars. It was not a princely sum, or even an adequate one. We soon ran out of money, and in those days we turned often to my father for loans. He had faith in us and our new company, and he did not press for repayment. So I decided to give him stock in the company. It turned out to be a wise investment for him because his faith was well rewarded. The stock added up and he became a major shareholder in the company.

  Although I appreciated having the separate income from my teaching job at Tokyo Institute of Technology, my heart was not in teaching. I was eager to get to work in our new company full-time. And so I was actually pleased to read in the paper one day that the Occupation authorities had decided to purge all teachers in Japanese schools who had been professional army or navy personnel. I figured that this meant me, because I was a professional technical officer, and according to my commission I had been committed to a lifetime in the now defunct Imperial Japanese Navy. The military purge ordered by the Allied Powers General Headquarters, which ran the Occupation (everybody called it GHQ for short), was based on the idea that professional military men, who had been the main culprits in the war and had controlled the government, should not be teaching and perhaps adversely influencing the impressionable schoolchildren of postwar Japan. The purge was good news for me, because I now had an excuse to be released from my commitment to the university and I could take up my job with the new company full-time.