What drove the late Akio Morita, the gregarious co-founder of Sony and at one point the most famous Japanese man in the world, for most of his business career were two things, according to John Nathan: pleasing his co-founder, the guileless tinkerer Masaru Ibuka, and understanding the American businessman in order to compete with him. Sony, founded as the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company Ltd in 1946, became a vehicle for Morita's two passions, which helps explain how the company has been able to maintain its reputation for superior products along with mammoth sales (about HK$443 billion in its most recent fiscal year). But Nathan - a Japanese studies professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, whose previous books include a biography of novelist Yukio Mishima and translations of the work of 1994 Nobel literature laureate Kenzaburo Oe - makes the strong argument that that era of personal relationships and 'sentimentality', which directly led to Sony's success in its first half-century, has passed. It rings true, especially in light of Morita's passing this week (Ibuka died in 1997). Nathan interviewed 115 people in Japanese for this book and the hard work shows. Avoiding the temptation to write 'true fiction' and reconstruct scenes and dialogue from 40 years ago, he presents an interesting narrative of the company's sprawling history, and incisive portraits of the paradoxical leading members of the Sony family. Take his colourful description of Ibuka, a gadget freak who loved to take apart electronic toys bought overseas for him by Morita. Ibuka, who had developed Sony's first winning product - a portable audio-tape recorder - was nonetheless baffled by computers. More than once, Ibuka rejected a promising technology out of hand simply because he failed to understand it. The compact-disc player was almost killed because of Ibuka's stubbornness. Morita, who ran the Sony family like the godfather, dominates the book. An 'incandescent' charmer who could work a room of Western businessmen, he lacked none of the embarrassed reticence typical of the Japanese salaryman forced to speak English. This was a skill that Morita apparently taught himself, and also urged others to learn. Early in his career, he founded a social club for Japanese business leaders that he dubbed Club Amphi. Amphi stood for amphibian, and in his manifesto, Morita declared that Japanese business leaders had to be able to function in both water and on land - meaning, in Japan and in the West. Around fellow Japanese, Morita was surprisingly quiet, even shy. Typical of his generation of Japanese men coming of age right after World War II, Morita did not hate Americans, so much as he was in awe of their wealth and technological advances. Success and recognition in the United States, the biggest consumer market in the world, was a club that Morita fervently wished to join. Morita recruited and became personal friends with his American executives, all Jews with whom Morita felt the kinship of being an outsider. All performed well, but all were ultimately dismissed by their one-time champion for various transgressions. How to bridge the cultural gulf between Japan and the US puzzled Morita to the end. Sony never became a family dynasty. Morita never touted his brothers or children as his heirs. Instead, he recruited Norio Ohga, a budding professional opera singer, to become his successor. Ohga became chairman in 1995, abdicating for his own appointed successor, current president Nobuyuki Idei. Both have accelerated Sony's transformation into a rationally led, marketing-driven company, not subject to the co-founders' whims. Those whims were directly responsible for Sony's ill-fated US$3.2 billion (HK$25.5 billion) purchase of Columbia Pictures in 1989. Nathan's eye for the telling detail illuminates. At one point, Ohga and the other top executives had unanimously decided to abandon their bid for Columbia. At dinner one night, Morita, not involved with day-to-day business anymore but still the chairman, sighed that this signalled the end of his dream of running an American studio. The next day, Ohga resumed negotiations. Sentimental attachment to Sony's founders prevailed, then. But in today's Sony, it would not. Sony - The Private Life by John Nathan HarperCollins $225