Could Japanese buyers afford the tape recorder? Did any want it? Akio Morita was the one who worked out how to market it. The occupation authorities were replacing rote memorization in Japanese schools with audiovisual learning. This meant flooding the schools with U.S.-made educational films. Unfortunately—and this was typical of the occupation—the films were in English, which Japanese students didn’t speak.
Morita saw a way to attach his firm, like a remora, to the underside of the occupation. Totsuko would make tapes of Japanese translations designed to accompany U.S. filmstrips. The market for the tape recorders would thus be not individuals, but schools. It was Totsuko’s first major success.
By this time, Ibuka and Morita had figured out which side their bread was buttered on. The tech came from the United States. The money came, directly or indirectly, from the United States. If their company wanted to grow, it was to the United States that it must look.
Ibuka, despite speaking almost no English, visited for the first time in 1952. While there, he learned of the transistor Bell Labs had developed. Again, as he had with the tape recorder, he made up his mind to invest heavily in a new U.S.-derived technology. He bought a Japanese patent for the transistor, despite warnings from U.S. engineers that the most profitable application for it was probably hearing aids. Ibuka waved them off. He wanted to make radios.
He also wanted to market them beyond Japan. For this, his firm would need a new name. Morita had also visited the United States and discovered that the old name—Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo—while perfectly normal for a Japanese business, tripped up English speakers. Even the short version, Totsuko, got him nowhere.
Ibuka and Morita sought a name that “could be recognized anywhere in the world,53 one that could be pronounced the same in any language,” Morita recalled. He wanted it to be short, like Ford. The two passed possibilities back and forth and ransacked dictionaries. Though neither yet spoke English well, they were drawn to the word sonus, the Latin root for the English sound. It had an additional resonance in Japan. GIs used an affectionate term for Japanese men: sonny or sonny boy. To many, that surely sounded condescending. But to strivers like Ibuka and Morita, it sounded like money.
We “thought of ourselves as ‘sonny-boys’ in those days,”54 Morita noted. “We were little boys in the business of sound.”55
They knocked off an n and trademarked the name: Sony. Noting the spread of English in Japan and elsewhere, they insisted on writing it in roman rather than Japanese characters, even for their advertisements in Japan. They adopted a mascot for the firm: “Sony Boy.”56 He was brown-haired, eager, and, to Western eyes, Caucasian.
“Little boys in the business of sound”: Sony’s transistor radio and its brown-haired mascot, Sony Boy
Sony’s first transistor radio, introduced in 1955, wasn’t the world’s first—a U.S. firm had beat it to the market. But Sony’s radios were the ones that sold. And starting with the 1957 model, they sold in the United States.
Not only did the radios sell, they effected a momentous shift in consumer culture. Before Sony, radios, tape recorders, and record players were furniture. They were large and expensive, and manufacturers competed to offer the purest sound—“hi-fidelity” was the buzzword. Sony changed that. Transistors allowed for tiny, cheap, battery-powered radios, which meant that music could be consumed by an individual rather than a household. Morita bragged that Sony’s radios were better than “portable”; they were “pocketable.” To drive the point home, he had his salesmen carry them in their (slightly enlarged) shirt pockets.
Sony wasn’t just selling a radio, it was selling a new way to consume media. Young listeners could now tune in without adult supervision (a teenage John Lennon had a transistor radio on display, the Beatles chronicler Bob Spitz has written, “like priceless art in his bedroom”).57 To the degree that we live in a world of pocket-size personal devices rather than one of large screens and subwoofers, we have Sony to thank. Or blame.
Sony’s transistor radio also inaugurated another epochal trend: Japanese technology firms producing superior goods. No longer was Sony the remora on the underside of the U.S. leviathan. It had detached and swum ahead.
Way ahead. Sony was the Apple of its day. In the 1960s it introduced the portable television, high-quality color television, and the first desktop calculator that didn’t require vacuum tubes. In the 1970s it was the VCR and the Walkman. In the 1980s Sony debuted compact discs, the Discman, the camcorder, the 3.5-inch floppy computer disk, and—despite its predilection for small sizes—the jumbotron.
Sony’s story was similar to that of the Beatles. Enterprising young men living cheek by jowl with the U.S. military get their start by imitating what they see around them. They learn guitar licks from Buddy Holly songs or struggle with stiff paper and raccoon-hair brushes to replicate a tape recorder. But give them time, and soon enough you’re listening to Abbey Road on your Walkman.
*
Standards work in a funny way. The firms or countries whose standards prevail sprint ahead while their competitors retool or learn the new system. Economists call it a “first-mover advantage.” But that advantage subsides with time. Once everyone uses 60-degree screw threads, there’s no benefit to having been the first one to have used them (though there may be other rewards for having gotten ahead of the learning curve). The longer the race, the less meaningful a head start is.
The United States’ ability to promulgate its standards gave it considerable first-mover advantages. But those who adopted U.S. standards early did well, too—call them the second movers. In nursing, the Filipinos were the second movers. In rock, it was the Liverpudlians. In industry, it was Sony and the other Japanese firms that grew up around the U.S. military. Their privileged position within the world economy, close to the source of standards and technology and with easy access to U.S. markets, allowed them to go global.
In other words, the international order that the United States built around itself after 1945 redounded to its benefit, but not permanently. Once other countries mastered U.S. standards, they too could profit and even compete with the United States itself. It is telling that the countries hosting the most U.S. peacetime bases—such as Britain, Japan, West Germany, and South Korea—numbered among the United States’ most formidable competitors.
In the sixties, the “British Invasion” reversed the cultural flow of rock music. Starting with the Beatles, British musicians who had mastered rock and blues made their way to the United States: the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, the Who, Pink Floyd, Van Morrison, and Led Zeppelin. Whatever first-mover advantage artists such as Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry used to enjoy had clearly expired, as the British bands could dominate the charts just as easily.
Sony started something similar with its transistor radio. And after it came still more Japanese firms. Such names as Nikon, Canon, Mitsubishi, Honda, Toyota, Subaru, Nissan, Mazda, Kawasaki, Toshiba, Sanyo, Panasonic, and Nintendo gained household familiarity in the United States. The trade balance between the two countries flipped in 1965,58 ten years after the introduction of Sony’s transistor radio. Now Japan was selling more to the United States than it was buying. California’s governor described this, with great chagrin, as a “colonial”59 relationship. “We ship her raw materials, she ships us finished goods.”
Japan’s rise was particularly conspicuous in the auto industry, a linch-pin of the U.S. economy. In 1980, hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers lost their jobs as auto companies closed forty assembly plants and some fifteen hundred dealerships.60 Meanwhile, small, fuel-efficient Japanese cars claimed ever-larger slices of the market.
Desperate business leaders tried to unlock the secret of Japan’s success. NBC ran a documentary called If Japan Can, Why Can’t We? that profiled W. Edwards Deming. Finally, after decades of semi-obscurity, Deming could command the fame in his own country that he’d enjoyed in Japan. “I’m proud to call myself a disciple of Dr. Deming,”61 Ford’s CEO declared.
Yet wh
ile an urge to emulate Japan seized executive suites, despair reigned on the shop floor. You could hear it in the music. The bubbly tunes of Buddy Holly had given way to gloomier fare. “Born down in a dead man’s town” was how Bruce Springsteen, the bard of deindustrialization, began his grim assessment of the national prospects in the song “Born in the U.S.A.” Five years later, Sony bought Columbia Records, Springsteen’s label. “Born in the U.S.A.” was now the property of Japan.
Nor was it just Springsteen. In buying Columbia Records, Sony claimed the catalogs of Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Simon and Garfunkel, and many other rock mainstays. Next, Sony bought Columbia Pictures, which owned such film classics as On the Waterfront, Ghostbusters, and The Bridge on the River Kwai. Mitsubishi bought Rockefeller Center in New York.
“Imagine, a few years from now.62 It’s December and the whole family is going to see the big Christmas tree in Hirohito Center,” warned an ad by General Motors. “Go on, keep buying Japanese cars.”
Resentment curdled, at least in some quarters. “They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs. They knock the hell out of our companies,” complained the real estate mogul Donald Trump on television.63 This issue marked Trump’s first foray into politics, and it struck a chord. The show’s host, Oprah Winfrey, noted that Trump’s message sounded like “presidential talk.” Would he ever consider running? “Probably not,” Trump replied, “but I do get tired of seeing the country ripped off.”
The author Michael Crichton took Japan-bashing further with his 1992 novel Rising Sun, a thriller about sinister, sexually perverse Japanese businessmen, one of whom murders a white woman. The film, starring Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, opened to protests by Asian Americans, who worried that it would incite violence. There had already been some. In Flint and Lansing in Michigan, Japanese cars had had their windows smashed and tires slashed. In Detroit, a Chrysler manager and a laid-off worker literally beat a Chinese American man’s brains out with a baseball bat—apparently they mistook him for Japanese. (“It’s because of you little motherfuckers that we’re out of work,”64 a witness testified hearing one of the killers say.)
Akio Morita of Sony, who lived in New York, was the face of Japan at this tense moment. In the early 1970s, when Time started reporting on Japan’s economic success in the United States,65 it ran a story, “How to Cope with Japan’s Business Invasion.” The cover showed a portable Sony TV, with Morita’s face beaming out against a background of yellow light.
Morita had always taken pains to seem unthreatening. He’d written two affable English-language books about his thoughts on business, stressing how much he’d learned from the United States. But in 1989 he began to publish some distinctly undeferential thoughts about his adoptive home. He excoriated the United States for its racism, economic inequality, and lack of business acumen.
Morita may have gotten rich off the U.S. military-industrial complex, but his gratitude, it turned out, was not bottomless. “Let’s become a Japan that can say no,”66 he advised his compatriots. He coauthored a book of that name—The Japan That Can Say No—written with a right-wing nationalist. He published it in Japanese and refused to have it translated. It was a far cry from his days as a self-styled “sonny boy.”
Akio Morita, as it happens, wasn’t the only beneficiary of the United States’ pointillist empire who would come to say no.
22
THE WAR OF POINTS
Of all the dots on the map that the United States would claim, few were as initially unpromising as Dhahran. The site itself was a blank spot in the desert. The nearest town, Khobar, wasn’t much more—a “few mud huts,”1 one observer wrote. And Dhahran was situated in Saudi Arabia, a monarchy not known for welcoming outsiders.
Yet Saudi Arabia had oil, and oil makes the world go round. A U.S. conglomerate called Aramco (it included Standard Oil, Texaco, and later Exxon and Mobil) bought the rights to explore for that oil. It was Aramco that established the initial settlement at Dhahran in the 1930s. And it was Aramco that built it up.
Or, at least, it was Aramco that paid. The construction itself was done by workers from the region. One, a Yemeni bricklayer named Mohamed, seemed particularly capable. He was illiterate and had only one eye, but he was “friendly and energetic,”2 as one of his colleagues put it, and a good builder. His story wasn’t all that different from Akio Morita’s at Sony or John Lennon’s in Liverpool—Mohamed was someone who’d figured out how to prosper in the shadow of a U.S. enclave. Like Morita and Lennon, he learned the ropes and then set off on his own. With Aramco’s blessing, he and his brother started their own construction firm: Mohamed and Abdullah, Sons of Awadh bin Laden.3
It was the right time to break into the market. Aramco was expanding. The oil-rich Saudi royal family was building palaces and roads. The United States, which had come to see Saudi Arabia as a node in its world transportation network, also had plans. The country was like “an immense aircraft carrier lying athwart a number of the principal air traffic lanes of the world,”4 a State Department cable put it. And so Washington arranged in 1945 to lease a large air base at Dhahran. That, too, would need building.
But the base was a delicate matter. The Saudi royals worried how it might look to let a U.S. flag fly over the land of Mecca and Medina. So nervous was the king that he forbade the U.S. consulate at Dhahran from physically planting a flag.5 Instead, the Stars and Stripes was attached to the side of the building to prevent its touching Saudi soil. And the site was to be called an “airfield,” never a base.
Still, the deal went through, and Dhahran—half company town, half base—grew larger. Aramco would claim that it was the largest concentration of U.S. citizens abroad. It looked,6 wrote a visitor in the 1950s, “just like a bit of U.S.A.—modern air-conditioned houses,7 swimming pool, movie theater etc.”
Just as the king feared, many Muslims blanched. The Dhahran complex brought Christians and Jews to the Holy Land, making the House of Saud complicit in the kingdom’s desecration. Internally, the royal family could (and did) quash the grumblings of dissent. But it could do little to silence the Voice of the Arabs,8 an Egyptian radio station critical of the Saudi state, which invoked Dhahran as its prime example of U.S. imperialism. Eventually the Saudi government relented and ended the lease. The U.S. military left the base in 1962.
These were choppy political waters, but Mohamed bin Laden surfed them adroitly. He became the Saudi government’s preferred builder. At the same time, he did so much business with the United States that he retained an agent in New York. He built classified projects for the U.S. military, including air bases and garrisons around Saudi Arabia’s western coast. He sent his oldest son, Salem, to England for a Western education. Four other sons would go on to study civil engineering in the United States.
Bin Laden died in 1967 in a plane crash (his pilot, like most of the men who flew him around, was a U.S. Air Force veteran). He left his fifty-four children shares in his construction firm, worth hundreds of millions. Some of his sons were happy to simply take the profits. Others got involved in the family business, which continued to win large defense and infrastructure contracts. One son, Osama, took up the work with a special zeal. He seemed to have a knack for the technical details.
Osama bin Laden also took an interest in politics. He’d learned it in school—the brother of the famed Islamist Sayyid Qutb had lectured at Osama’s university in Jeddah. As Osama came to see it, there was a great conflict between Islam and Western empires. Muslim lands, he concluded, must be defended against imperialists.
Unfolding events confirmed that view. In 1978, communists in Afghanistan staged a coup, deposing the elected president. Not only was this a revolution led by infidels, it gave the Soviet Union a foothold in the region as it sent troops to support the faltering new regime. Moscow intended this as temporary. “It’ll be over in three to four weeks,”9 predicted Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader.
It wasn’t. Resistance fighters, known as the mujahidin, made protrac
ted war on the Soviet-backed state. The Saudi government, eager to establish itself as the world defender of Islam, supported them. So did the United States, which enjoyed watching the other side expend its energies in a luckless war in Asia. It was time to “finally sow shit in their backyard,”10 as National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said. The two governments agreed to bankroll the mujahidin via a matching arrangement: one U.S. dollar for every Saudi one.
Osama bin Laden, keen to take on the godless superpower occupying Muslim lands, joined the mujahidin. He began by traveling back and forth between Saudi Arabia and Peshawar, just on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border, to raise funds and recruit fighters. But eventually he moved to Peshawar. He brought with him what he estimated to be a hundred tons of heavy construction equipment from Saudi Arabia: bulldozers,11 dump trucks, and trench-digging equipment. He dug tunnels and built roads. He put up air-raid shelters. He built a hospital.
Bin Laden was, in other words, an infrastructure guy. He was essentially running a mujahidin base in Pakistan. In 1988 he formed a small organization to direct the jihad. It was called, fittingly, al-Qaeda al-Askariya (“the Military Base”). Or just al-Qaeda (“the Base”), for short.
Was al-Qaeda a big deal? Not really. It played only a small part in ousting the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. But the experience had taught Bin Laden an important lesson. He’d seen one of the world’s great armies beaten back by a ragtag (though well-funded) guerrilla alliance. In 1989 the Red Army retreated to Uzbekistan. By 1991, the whole Jenga tower of European communism had come crashing down.
How to Hide an Empire Page 42