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.