Big Optimism: The radio repair shop

At least, that's what it started out as.

Today’s story began on the seventh floor of a bombed-out department store in Tokyo, 80 years ago this week: May 7, 1946.

This was less than a year after the unconditional surrender of Japan to the Allied forces. The country’s economy was in ruins. An engineer named Masaru Ibuka borrowed about $500 to start a radio repair shop.

Seeking to branch out, his tiny company tried to manufacture and sell electric rice cookers to a starving nation.

The rice cookers didn’t work. Next up: tape recorders — enormous, rudimentary things. Ibuka and his small team eventually showed courts how the machines could replace stenographers, and showed schools what they could do for language learning. Slowly, they found customers.

The real turning point, in retrospect, may have been a short article in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper about the venture — because another engineer who had known Ibuka during the war read it and reached out.

They teamed up. What followed was success that most people can only dream of. But first, the two men:

• Masaru Ibuka: Born 1908 in Nikko, Japan. Lost his father at two, raised by his grandfather, became a solitary tinkering child who by 17 was operating a shortwave radio station connecting with strangers across oceans. Spent World War II as a defense contractor for the Imperial Navy, and when it ended found himself 37 years old in a ruined country with nothing but his tools and his ingenuity.

• Akio Morita: Born 1921 near Nagoya, the firstborn son of a sake-brewing dynasty that traced its lineage to 1665. His father began grooming him to be the fifteenth-generation heir before he could understand what that meant — but his mother owned one of Japan’s first RCA Victrola record players, and Morita spent his childhood taking it apart instead. He walked away from three centuries of family obligation to study physics, graduating in 1944 directly into the Imperial Navy.

They’d met on a wartime research committee. Ibuka was the civilian technical expert, 13 years older. Morita was a 23-year-old ensign who had walked away from 300 years of inheritance to study physics.

They were temperamentally opposite — Ibuka shy and introspective, Morita outgoing and restless — and became close friends almost immediately.

The war ended in August 1945. Ibuka set up his radio repair shop. He called it Tokyo Telecommunications Research Institute.

On October 6, 1945, the newspaper article ran. Morita, preparing to join the faculty of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, read it. He went to Tokyo to find his old wartime colleague.

Their partnership flourished — but it was in 1952, when Ibuka visited the United States and learned that Bell Laboratories had licensed transistor technology, that things really changed. Ibuka saw a pocket-sized radio. He saw what consumer electronics could become.

Morita flew to New York the following year and completed the licensing deal.

In 1958, preparing to sell to the world, they renamed the company — combining the Latin word sonus with sonny, American slang for a bright young person. Sony. Four letters. Recognizable everywhere.

In 1961, Sony became the first Japanese company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1979 it gave the world the Walkman. In 1982, the compact disc. More cameras than we know what to do with.

The PlayStation followed.

Ibuka died in 1997. Morita died in 1999. In 1992, when both men suffered serious health crises at nearly the same time, they were placed in adjoining hospital rooms.

Ibuka’s son told reporters that the bond between them had been “more like love than friendship.”

They had met in a wartime committee room, building weapons for a losing war.

One of them was supposed to be a sake brewer. The other had lost his father at two years old.

Between them, starting from a city in ruins, they built a company that changed how the world listened to music, watched television, and came to see Japan in an entirely different way.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• May 3: “It seemed unthinkable. We were flying at nearly 500 miles an hour, at 35,000 feet, and the ride was as smooth and quiet as sitting in a drawing room.” — A passenger aboard the de Havilland Comet, as reported in contemporary press accounts of the world’s first scheduled jet passenger service, arriving in Johannesburg this day in 1952.

• May 4: “This is the most important decision in my life — to give up all if necessary for the Freedom Ride, that justice and freedom might come to the Deep South.” — John Lewis, 21 years old, one of 13 black and white activists who boarded buses in Washington D.C. on this day in 1961 and headed south to challenge segregation. In Alabama, one bus was firebombed and passengers were beaten with pipes and bats. The rides continued for six months and led directly to the federal desegregation of interstate travel facilities.

• May 5: “A new and useful improvement in weaving straw with silk or thread.” — The official description of the patent issued on this day in 1809 to Mary Kies of Killingly, Connecticut — the first patent granted to a woman in American history. Women could legally apply for patents under the Patent Act of 1790, but almost none did, because in most states they could not legally own property independent of their husbands. Kies died penniless in 1837, her patent file destroyed in a fire, fashion having moved on.

• May 6: “I felt suddenly and gloriously free from the burden of athletic ambition that I had been carrying for years.” — Roger Bannister, a 25-year-old medical student who on this day in 1954 ran a mile in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds at Oxford’s Iffley Road track, becoming the first person in history to break the four-minute mile — a barrier that experts had long declared the absolute limit of human capability.

• May 7: “Let the good times roll.” — The unofficial motto of New Orleans, the city founded on this day in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, a French-Canadian naval officer who had entered the French navy at age 12. He chose a crescent-shaped bend in the Mississippi River 100 miles from its mouth, believing it would be safe from hurricanes and tidal surges. He was not entirely right about that.

• May 8: “The world and all its peoples have won freedom from smallpox.” — The official declaration of the 33rd World Health Assembly, issued on this day in 1980 — the only time in human history that a disease has been completely eradicated. Smallpox had killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone, and had plagued humanity for at least 3,000 years.

• May 9: “A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world.” — Anna Jarvis, the West Virginia woman who spent years campaigning for a national Mother’s Day holiday, which President Woodrow Wilson officially proclaimed on this day in 1914, and then spent the rest of her life trying to undo it because she objected to the commercialism.