Made In Japan

by Akio Morita

  Yoshiko’s life as a young girl was full of activity; her Tokyo household was not too different from mine in Nagoya, that is, with servants and relatives bustling around, and sisters and a brother having their good times and spats. There was talk of business in the house all the time, she recalls, just as there was in my home. As a child, she had only twice been as far west as the resort area of Hakone, near Mount Fuji, and after we were introduced, back in 1951, she confided that she thought my hometown, Nagoya, which is even farther west, was really out in the boondocks. But her father wore Western clothes and was something of an internationalist. He liked to take the family out to dine. One of their favorites was the New Grand restaurant in the Ginza. My parents had taken me to the same restaurant, and later Yoshiko and I discovered we both remembered from childhood the impressive big blue and red neon sign on top of the building.

  Our two boys, Hideo and Masao, and our daughter, Naoko, would find the new life-style in America difficult, we knew, but they were young and adaptable. Hideo was ten, Masao was eight, and little Naoko was only six. I felt that it would be a good experience for them, even though it would be difficult for everybody in the beginning.

  Back in Tokyo, Ibuka was skeptical. His main objection was that he didn’t like the idea of his executive vice president being so far away, but I proposed that I commute every two months and spend a week or so in Tokyo each time. I also was a great advocate of the telephone, and still am, and explained that we could really be in touch at any time. He agreed, as I knew he would, and I put my plan into motion. My travels across the Pacific would not diminish much, I knew. (I stopped counting my trans-Pacific trips at one hundred and thirty-five, a long time ago.)

  In New York I already had our office people searching for an apartment for my family, and in no time they came across the perfect apartment for us. Nathan Milstein, the great concert violinist, lived in a third-floor apartment at 1010 Fifth Avenue, across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art at Eighty-second Street. He had decided to move to Paris for two years, and the apartment was for rent, completely furnished. The rent was rather high, or at least so it seemed to our Japanese pocketbooks in those days, twelve hundred dollars a month, but everything was right about the apartment: the location had prestige and we did not have to move a lot of furniture to New York or even do any decorating. Maestro Milstein’s taste would be good enough for us. We could move right in. The place had twelve rooms—to us, accustomed to very small quarters in Japan, it was palatial. It had at least four bedrooms, plus servants’ quarters, a huge living room, a separate dining room, and a den, all very spacious and tastefully and comfortably furnished. At night the lights of the museum would turn on, flooding the facade, and we could imagine it was Paris, though New York was very glamorous to us. I moved in in April, but because the children were still in school the family couldn’t come until June. I was alone, but I had a lot of work to do. I commuted to the office by bus every day, mingling with New Yorkers, listening to them talk, observing their habits almost like a sociologist. I was also selling our products, making calls on clients, and when I could break away I visited schools in Manhattan to try to find places for the children.

  Sam Hartwell, of Smith Barney, was my biggest helper in the school search. He had children in school in the city, and he knew the territory. He gave me invaluable advice and even set up interviews and sometimes went along with me. I must have had interviews at twenty schools, trying to find a suitable one that would take three young Japanese who had no English-language ability at all. I wanted a school that would accept them for at least two years, because that was how long I originally intended to stay. There wasn’t a lot of interest among the schools. Most of them had established a European-influenced tradition, but finally the headmaster at St. Bernard’s said he was interested in making his school more broadly international and he agreed to accept the boys. I found the Nightingale-Bamford School for Naoko, and with the school problem solved, I began to feel more comfortable with the idea of the family move to America.

  Next we had to break the news to the children, and so I flew back to Tokyo and took the whole family to the new Palace Hotel, where I rented a suite for the weekend. It was 1963, and the city was getting ready for the 1964 Summer Olympics, building an entire expressway system and many new hotels and public facilities. It was a treat for the family to stay in one of Tokyo’s newest hotels at this exciting time. The boys remember that suite very well because it was their first visit to a Western-style hotel, and Hideo was impressed that he didn’t have to take his shoes off at the door of the room. That Saturday night, we had a big dinner in the elegant top-floor Crown Restaurant overlooking the grounds of the imperial palace, and later back in our suite I broke the news about going to the United States. I promised them a trip to Disneyland on the way. The children didn’t know what they were getting into, but Masao, who was eight, was eager. He said later that since all the Western movies on TV were dubbed into Japanese, he thought everyone in America spoke Japanese. Hideo, who was older, wasn’t as enthusiastic about the move, as he was reluctant to leave his friends. But we did go to Disneyland and we stayed in a hotel right at the park and gave the children the full tour before we moved on to New York. We all still remember the trip happily.

  I realized what a disruption this move would be for the family, but I am a believer in the total immersion theory, and so one week after we arrived in New York, and before we could get settled, we enrolled the boys at Camp Winona in Maine. I figured that there would be no quicker way of getting them into the swing of life in America. Camp rules were that we could not visit them for the first two weeks, so they would really be on their own and would have to make an adjustment to this new life quickly.

  Once we had settled the boys in camp, I suggested that Yoshiko get an American driver’s license because, I told her, in America everybody had to drive. And besides, there might be some business driving for her to do. Also, with the boys in Maine (we found a day camp for Naoko in Manhattan) and because I would have to travel, it would be important for her to be able to get around on her own. I felt we ought to be able to see friends in the suburbs and take weekend trips. Preparing for the written test, she was so worried about her limited English-speaking ability that she just memorized all the test material, including the one hundred possible test questions, although she didn’t understand much of it. She passed with a perfect score and had no trouble passing the driving test, but we had to borrow a stick-shift Volkswagen for her because the Cadillac I bought was automatic and she didn’t feel comfortable yet driving an automatic car.

  Yoshiko likes to recall that one of the first things I demanded of her after we were married in 1951 was that she get a driving license, which was unusual for a woman in Japan then, but she did it and was a very experienced driver by the time we needed her in New York. While we were developing our company we had a steady stream of Tokyo engineers and others visiting New York, and Yoshiko was invaluable to them. Sometimes one of our visiting Japanese would get ill or have a problem with the strange food or need help because he couldn’t understand what was taking place. Yoshiko would cook for them and counsel them.

  Our den became an electronics lab where the engineers would examine and test competitors’ TV sets. There were TV sets and components and tools all over the den, and Japanese were going to and fro all day long. When Tokyo executives arrived, Yoshiko would be assigned to drive out to meet them at Kennedy Airport, then called Idlewild. Sometimes in bad weather or for some other reason, an incoming flight would be diverted to Newark, and so Yoshiko would have to drive all the way from Idlewild to New Jersey to meet the flight. In Manhattan she would chauffeur us to our meetings downtown, to Wall Street, or elsewhere. And sometimes she would drive an engineer all over the suburban area while he checked to see how sensitive our FM radios were, that is, how far away from the Empire State Building he could go in every direction before the signal began to fade.

  For the boys, life at summer ca
mp was tough at first. There were no other Japanese children there, and they were assigned to different groups, and slept in different tents. The camp director bought an English-Japanese dictionary so he could learn a few words of Japanese to use with them so they wouldn’t feel completely cut off. We heard later that the boys cried a little at night, and that’s understandable. We had given them a note that read “Please call my father” and told them to use it in case they had trouble and didn’t know what to do, but they didn’t use it. I felt terrible, in a way, but I thought this experience was for their own good. When we left them that first day, both Yoshiko and I were fighting back tears.

  Masao said he spent his days doing what everybody else did, at first not realizing or understanding why he was doing it. At Camp Winona there was a lot of personal choice, which is very different from Japanese summer camp, where everybody follows the same curriculum. Masao just did what the majority did. Because of their age difference, Hideo was in intermediate camp and Masao was in junior camp, and so they only saw each other at lunchtime, two Japanese boys with no English, learning how to play baseball, swimming and climbing rocks with American kids who spoke a third language, American slang. But they got along well with the other campers, and my wife and I visited on weekends as often as possible. Hideo, a hearty eater, was thrilled with the big portions, the variety of ice cream, and the large servings of melon and fruit juice. Masao wasn’t as happy with the camp, but when it was time to return the next summer he was eager to go, and when he had to leave he was upset.

  The children were learning independence and American style, and it was all very healthy for them. They saw the differences between Americans and Japanese and came to understand the feeling of pride in your country and the symbolism of the national flag. They felt it was great to sing the American national anthem and to hoist the flag every morning. Later, when we built a new house in Tokyo, we had a flagpole installed, and every morning until the boys again went overseas to school they would hoist the Japanese flag. All of our Sony factories today fly the Japanese flag, the Sony flag, and the flag of the host country they are in. Like Olympic athletes, we are, after all, in a concrete way representing Japan and should wear the symbol of our country proudly.

  Naoko was too young to send to camp that year, so we sent her to Beachwood day camp in the city, and she grew accustomed to the new life with the adaptability very small children seem to have. After a year of first grade in New York, she seemed ready for summer camp, and she thought she was, too, after hearing her brothers talk about Camp Winona. When we made our first visit to see her after two weeks the next year, she took us down to the lake and rowed us around in a row boat all by herself, proud of her accomplishment. When I asked her about her feelings later, she confessed that she got very lonely at night when the lights went out and would cry. To make herself feel more secure, she would turn on her flashlight under the covers. The flashlight story explained the small mystery of her dwindling allowance. She was spending all the money we gave her to buy flashlight batteries at the camp store.

  The boys returned from Maine after that first summer full of fresh air and vitality. The first thing they noticed about New York—and complained about—was the smell of exhaust fumes and the smog of the city. As the school term began, the other students at St. Bernard’s accepted the boys with curiosity at first. They had trouble pronouncing their names. Hideo remembers that most of his classmates called him “High-dee.” Later, at boarding school in England, they called him Joe, which was an abbreviation for Tojo, the only Japanese name his classmates had ever heard, apparently. Masao remembers how frustrating it was with his very limited English vocabulary to understand what was going on in French class. He was trying to learn English as a second language, and now he was expected to learn a third language by using the second language he was only beginning to understand.

  Yoshiko’s English was terrible in the beginning, but she made up her mind to use it and study and listen, and she made friends quickly. While I traveled, and when she didn’t have heavy company duties, she would take the kids skiing in the Catskills or visit our friends in the suburbs of New York. On weekends when I was in New York, we would sometimes go on picnics, Yoshiko driving and me with a map in my lap, acting as navigator. She also became very good at entertaining, giving dinner and cocktail parties, with only one Japanese helper, a maid we brought with us. During our New York stay, we entertained more than four hundred people in our apartment, and Yoshiko became so good at it that when we returned to Japan she wrote a book titled My Thoughts on Home Entertaining, which was an instant hit and is still used as a reference on the subject by Japanese who are having foreign guests or visiting in foreign homes. It is still uncommon today for Japanese to entertain in their homes, although those who have international experience and live in something better than the average apartment are inviting foreigners home more frequently these days.

  Yoshiko had a difficult time at first because she would often be invited to luncheons by wives of American businessmen and others, but we only had one interpreter in New York at the time, a man, and Yoshiko felt it wouldn’t be proper to bring him to a ladies’ luncheon. Also, in Japan husbands never take their wives along on business entertainment outings, and on other occasions when two or more couples are together, husbands and wives sit side by side. But of course in the West it is customary for the host to have the female guest of honor on his right, often far away from her husband, so the pressure was really on Yoshiko to learn how to communicate.

  In her book, Yoshiko told how encouraged she was, as a poorly traveled Japanese with almost no English-language fluency, to go to parties in New York and find French and Spanish women whose English was no better. She gave a lot of practical advice. For example, she cautioned Japanese women against wearing kimono at the wrong times: “A party is held so that those who are invited can enjoy themselves equally over a meal and conversation with each other. When everyone wears the same kind of outfit, harmony is enhanced. If there is even one person wearing prominently splendid clothing, it makes everyone uncomfortable and the whole party lacks warmth.” She learned how to entertain elegantly and simply and how to make people feel relaxed. In Japan, she realized, some foreign guests were apprehensive about the possibility of being served a Japanese meal with chopsticks, even though we have a modern, Western-style home. When we have such a guest, she will open our dining room doors early while we are having cocktails so that the guests can see that the table is set with silverware in the Western style. She kept lists of the people who visited our home, when they came, and what they liked. For example, her lists note that the German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau likes only simple grilled meat; pianist Andre Watts’s mother doesn’t like fish; conductor Leonard Bernstein likes sushi and sashimi, and so on.

  Her outgoing manner pleased the Americans she met and sometimes confused the Japanese, as I myself have done, being rather outspoken for a Japanese. One day in New York, my friend the fashion designer Issey Miyake told me that he was upset that Yoshiko and Diana Vreeland, the fashion editor, who was also his friend, had had “a terrible fight.” In no time Diana was on the phone asking for Yoshi, as everyone called her. What about the fight? There was no fight, just a difference of opinion that is natural among Westerners, but which most Japanese try to avoid. It is very difficult to fight in the Japanese language because of the character and structure of the language, and the fact that it is very indirect and nonconfrontational forces politeness on you unless you want to get very rough. Most Japanese, hearing any Western argument, tend to overreact to such exchanges.

  Yoshiko has always been interested in fashion, and through the friends she made in New York she began to bring the fashion news to Japan. Using our newest U-Matic video tape recorder, she has interviewed fashion designers such as Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta, the late Perry Ellis, and others and has videotaped their fashions. When we moved back to Japan, she did a television show on fashion for about ten years, tra
veling to the fashion centers abroad and bringing back interviews and introducing new ideas to Japan, which was then behind the times in fashion awareness and not the fashion leader it is today.

  Although we had planned to stay two years in New York, our visit was cut short by the unexpected death of my father. He had relieved me of the responsibility for the family business after the war, but I remained the eldest son and now I was the head of the Morita family and its fortunes, and so I had to be back in Tokyo. I left New York immediately, and Yoshiko cleared out the apartment in one day, rushed up to Camp Winona and brought the children back to New York, tied up all the loose ends, sent the baggage ahead, and was back in Japan within a week. The children were not happy to be leaving camp or the United States; they said they were just getting to enjoy it and to feel at home. The children took up their education for a time back in Japan, but then we found schools for them abroad, Hideo and Masao in England and Naoko in Switzerland.

  A death in the family makes you examine your life and the future of the family. Where my children were concerned, I felt very strongly that the new postwar educational system in Japan lacked discipline. The teachers, with some important exceptions, did not have the dignity they once had and were not given the status they should have in society. The leftist teachers’ union and pressure from PTA groups had watered down the quality of education, and study for examinations was nothing but rote application.

  When I attended middle school, discipline was very strict, and this included our physical as well as our mental training. Our classrooms were very cold in winter; we didn’t even have a heater; and we were not allowed to wear extra clothes. In the navy, I had hard training, even though I only had to undergo four months of it in boot camp, but every morning we had to run a long way before breakfast. In those days I did not think of myself as a physically strong person, and yet under such strict training I found I was not so weak after all, and the knowledge of my own ability gave me confidence in myself that I did not have before. It is the same with mental discipline; unless you are forced to use your mind, you become mentally lazy and you will never fulfill your potential.