Entrepreneurs
The Allied Occupation of Japan - Part IV
A parent returning home from a lengthy work trip is a moment of pure joy for children. The chance to be scooped up in your father or mother’s arms and given a long-awaited hug. The possibility of a present stashed away inside a suitcase - something fun and intriguing from a faraway place.
So pity the son of Ibuka Masaru. Across the 1950s and ‘60s, Ibuka made regular trips to the United States. He would return home with the very latest high-tech toys - and then, before his son’s sorrowful, disbelieving eyes, he would smash them, take them apart and fiddle with them to the point where they were impossible to play with.
Ibuka was not a sadistic father. He was an entrepreneur, learning from the best. Alongside Morita Akio, he served as a researcher in the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II. At war’s end, the pair of them established a small electronics company called Tokyo Tsūshin Kōgyō - ‘Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company,’ or TTEC.
It was a grand name for a company whose HQ was a leaky shack and whose sole vehicle - and old Datsun truck - ran on black market petrol liberated from US Army stores. But Morita and Ibuka were determined to manoeuvre themselves to the forefront of what they were sure would be a resurgent electronics industry in peace-time Japan.
Left: Morita Akio. Right: Ibuka Masaru
Their first product was a tape recorder, which used magnetic tape made by frying yellow oxalic ferrite in a pan until it turned into brown ferric oxide. This was mixed with clear lacquer and then applied - using fine, badger-hair brushes - to hemp-strengthened craft paper painstakingly cut into strips with razor blades.
Morita and Ibuka were convinced that this was the technology of the future. Free speech was returning to Japan, and the national broadcaster NHK was encouraging the public to sing on the radio. Surely people would enjoy recording themselves on tape, then playing it back? Full of optimism, the two men loaded up their Datsun with TTEC’s pride and joy: a 35-kilogram tape recorder.
Sadly, potential buyers were unimpressed. The machine was huge, expensive and used too much power. A population still trying to recover a basic standard of living saw no pressing case for it.
Early postwar Tokyo
Even when TTEC whittled down the size of the new device to that of a bulky briefcase, the only buyers they could find were schools, currently being cajoled by American Occupation personnel into using more audio material in classes.
TTEC needed a miracle - and as luck would have it, one was being wrought at that very moment across the Pacific.
Thank you for reading! Please support my work by becoming a paid subscriber, and then read on for:
The miracle invention that saved Morita and Ibuka’s young company.
How Occupation politics nearly killed their prospects.
How an ingenious bit of advertising saved the day.
