Oct 18, 2026 · 1 hr 24 min · 16 segments
He was the 15th-generation heir to a 300-year-old sake-brewing family, and his father let him walk away. In 1946, he and Masaru Ibuka pooled about $500 in the ruins of postwar Tokyo to start the…
I was 24 with a degree from Osaka Imperial University and was working with an interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers trying to perfect thermal guidance weapons and night vision gun sights.
We didn't know how horrible an atomic weapon could be, but I had seen the terrible results of conventional firebombing.
In fact, I was in Tokyo just after the night of March 9th through the 10th when the incendiary bombs from wave after wave of B-29s had whipped up a firestorm that killed 100,000 people in just a few hours.
I looked around my colleagues and said to everyone at the table, we might as well give up our research now.
Although we knew there was a difference between American and Japanese technology, We thought ours was very good, and it was.
We noticed that the Americans were using some advanced technology and different electrical circuitry, but it wasn't a great deal better than our own.
Akio Morita has gone through in his early days as a 20-something year old losing the war and what he ends up building in Sony and how this affects him and impacts him and why he wants to make Japan known for high quality.
And another impact of Akio Morita in the early days, he'd say, in fact, as a boy in high school, I had seen a film of the construction of the Ford Motor Company River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, and was thrilled by the concept of this gigantic project.
So clearly he had an interest very early on in like mass scale production and manufacturing.
And we also see what Akima Rida, even as a young person, was thinking about his skill set and how much confidence he had in himself.
He'd say, I don't mind saying that even then, as a young man, I felt that somehow I had a role to play in that future.
He already has the confidence and the ambition that he's going to help Japan out of the terrible place they're in during that time.
But in reading that, I think you're probably thinking the same thing I was, which was, who is this 24-year-old that felt so sure that he had a role to play in Japan? He's an unknown at the time.
I was 24 with a degree from Osaka Imperial University and was working with an interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers trying to perfect thermal guidance weapons and night vision gun sights.
We didn't know how horrible an atomic weapon could be, but I had seen the terrible results of conventional firebombing.
In fact, I was in Tokyo just after the night of March 9th through the 10th when the incendiary bombs from wave after wave of B-29s had whipped up a firestorm that killed 100,000 people in just a few hours.
I looked around my colleagues and said to everyone at the table, we might as well give up our research now.
Although we knew there was a difference between American and Japanese technology, We thought ours was very good, and it was.
We noticed that the Americans were using some advanced technology and different electrical circuitry, but it wasn't a great deal better than our own.
Akio Morita has gone through in his early days as a 20-something year old losing the war and what he ends up building in Sony and how this affects him and impacts him and why he wants to make Japan known for high quality.
And another impact of Akio Morita in the early days, he'd say, in fact, as a boy in high school, I had seen a film of the construction of the Ford Motor Company River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, and was thrilled by the concept of this gigantic project.
So clearly he had an interest very early on in like mass scale production and manufacturing.
And we also see what Akima Rida, even as a young person, was thinking about his skill set and how much confidence he had in himself.
He'd say, I don't mind saying that even then, as a young man, I felt that somehow I had a role to play in that future.
He already has the confidence and the ambition that he's going to help Japan out of the terrible place they're in during that time.
But in reading that, I think you're probably thinking the same thing I was, which was, who is this 24-year-old that felt so sure that he had a role to play in Japan? He's an unknown at the time.
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