Made in Japan

In one sentence: Akio Morita's 1986 autobiography, co-written with two journalists, is the kind of book Acquired's hosts treat as an '80s-vintage Shoe Dog — its opening paragraph gets read verbatim on air, and plenty of quotes later attributed to Steve Jobs turn out to be Morita's first.

(Note: this is a different book from Made in America, Sam Walton's memoir, already in this library — the titles just rhyme.)

Overview

Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony was published by Dutton in 1986, co-written by Morita with Time correspondent Edwin M. Reingold and Japanese journalist Mitsuko Shimomura. It opens on the defining moment of August 15, 1945: Morita, having lunch with his Navy colleagues, hears the news of the Hiroshima bombing — "The future had never been more uncertain — Japan had never lost a war — and only a young man could be optimistic. Yet I had confidence in myself and my future even then." From there it traces how he and Masaru Ibuka built a postwar radio-repair operation into the company behind the transistor radio, the Trinitron, the Walkman, and the CD — rewriting "Made in Japan" from a synonym for shoddy goods into a mark of quality. The book carries several of Morita's own recurring maxims, including his account of turning down a 100,000-unit private-label order from Bulova — a decision he later called "the single biggest and best business decision of my career" — and his oft-quoted line that no market research could have predicted the Walkman's success.

Why It's Worth Reading

Ben opens the Sony episode by saying both he and David read this book to prepare. David then reads the entire opening paragraph aloud, verbatim, to set the scene of Morita hearing about Hiroshima. The bigger thread running through the episode is "Steve Jobs before Steve Jobs": Morita's line — "I do not believe any amount of market research could have told us that the Sony Walkman would be successful... and yet the Sony Walkman has literally changed the habits of millions of people around the world" — reads almost identically to Jobs's later "Apple doesn't do focus groups" and "people can't tell you what they want." David notes Jobs himself knew the lineage: in a 1997 meeting, Morita gave Jobs and John Sculley one of the first Walkmans, and Jobs immediately took it apart to study every component. When Morita died in 1999, Jobs opened his Macworld keynote with a photo of Morita and read a eulogy on stage: "While he was leading Sony, they invented the whole consumer electronics marketplace — the transistor radio, Trinitron television, first consumer VCR, Walkman, audio CD."

Sourcing

The book is the primary source Acquired draws on throughout the Sony episode: the opening Hiroshima passage, the Bulova rejection story, and the Walkman "no market research" line are all quoted directly from it. The episode's closing discussion of what "Made in Japan" means also returns to the book's title as the image it ends on.