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Nov 13, 2006 · Akio Morita & Masaru Ibuka. In 1944, a young officer in the Japanese Imperial Navy met a civilian radio engineer, 13 years his senior, on a task force to develop a heat-seeking missile. Within two years, World War II had ended, Japan was trying to rebuild its industrial base, and the two men were working together tinkering with radios and other ...
May 7, 2021 · By Matthew Hernon. May 7, 2021. On this day 75 years ago Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita founded Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo (also known as Totsuko), an electronics company that would later change its name to Sony and go on to become one of the world’s most iconic brands. The pair first met at a Wartime Research Committee in Yokosuka towards the end of ...
Biography: Masaru Ibuka was a Japanese electronics engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Sony Corporation, one of the world's leading technology and entertainment companies. Alongside his business partner Akio Morita , Ibuka played a pivotal role in the development of innovative consumer electronics products that revolutionized the industry ...
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Masaru Ibuka was born on April 11, 1908, as the first son of Tasuku Ibuka, an architectural technologist and a student of Inazo Nitobe. [4] His ancestral family were chief retainers of the Aizu Domain, and his relatives include Yae Ibuka and Ibuka Kajinosuke. Masaru lost his father at the age of two and was taken over by his grandfather. [5]
- A Symbol of Japan’s Postwar Economic Miracle
- A Visionary Name Choice
- Resisting Temptation
- Ibuka’S Toy Becomes The Walkman
- New York Debut
- Controversial Opinions
- Amiable and Magnanimous
In December 2020, Ezra Vogel, famed US Japanologist and professor emeritus at Harvard University, passed away. Just a year earlier, in an interview with Mainichi newspaper’s Economist magazine, he lamented contemporary Japan’s loss of “hunger.” He spoke of the passing of the prominent entrepreneurs of postwar Japan, including Morita Akio, Honda Sōi...
The name “Sony” was the brainchild of Morita, who was adamant that the company name should be easy for people outside Japan to pronounce. He knew that neither Tōkyō Tsūshin Kōgyō nor its Japanese abbreviation, Tōtsūkō, would do. He and Ibuka struggled to find a suitable name, finally settling on “Sony” in 1955. The name, registered in katakana, was...
The background to Sony’s emergence as a global brand includes a decisive episode that is now company lore. In 1955, the company developed the world’s second transistor radio, and a major US watch manufacturer offered to buy 100,000 units. Morita was initially impressed with the offer, given the scale of their business, but his excitement cooled whe...
Morita also possessed an eye for recognizing potential hit products. The story of the Walkman portable headphone cassette playeris a classic example. It began with a request in 1978 to developers by Ibuka, then honorary chairman, to customize a portable cassette player for him. He wanted to be able to enjoy music in stereo when flying overseas on a...
Morita’s pioneering global approach was radical. In 1962, Sony opened a showroom on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Morita believed that demand for Sony products would be spurred by a prominent presence in the Big Apple, visited by people from all over the world. A part of him also dreamed of brandishing the Japanese flag in this major arena of the busine...
Thanks to Morita’s desire to fit in, he gained many friends and acquaintances from diverse fields, including leading businessmen, heads of state, politicians, and artists. But the 1980s saw a growing fear in the West of the threat posed by Japanese business, and increasing trade friction with the United States and Europe. In 1989, Morita co-authore...
The first time I met Morita, I was impressed that although he was chairman of the company, he wore the same gray uniform as the employees, and was smiling and amiable throughout the interview. This man was contending with world heavyweights on an equal footing, but he was not intimidating. If anything, he had an air of humility. Many hoped that he ...
Masaru Ibuka. As co-founder and longtime president of the Sony Corporation, Japanese executive Masaru Ibuka (1908-1997) conceived of and brought to fruition several of the most popular and fundamentally influential consumer electronics innovations of the twentieth century. The public face of Sony for decades was its chairman and marketing ...
Mar 14, 2019 · In 1946, another Japanese researcher, Akio Morita, found out about Ibuka’s venture through the newspaper and was wanted to work with him. So he met Ibuka and the two co-founded Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation. Morita’s helped the two raise the funds for the company. With the end of World War II and the big atom bomb attacks ...
