Made In Japan

by Akio Morita

  We looked at all of our factory operations and at our products and made design changes where we could save even small amounts of energy. Within a few months of the embargo, we had modified our Trinitron picture tube design from indirect to direct heating of the cathode element to cut consumption by 12 percent. We also restudied all forms of power consumption at Sony, in our factories and offices as well as in the products. I had made the same kind of energy analysis when my wife and I were building our new home in the Aobadai district of Tokyo, in 1969. I wanted a heated swimming pool in the basement, but there were two problems: first, humidity would rise to the upper floors, and second, the heat loss from the pool would be great and wasteful. Ninety percent of the heat loss would be due to evaporation, I calculated. I solved both problems by devising a plastic foam barrier to cover the entire surface of the pool, sealing in moisture and heat—and I patented the idea in the United States and Japan.

  In 1973 every maker of home appliances went to work to cut power consumption, and in fact they competed with each other to see who could produce products using the least power; low power consumption became a major selling point and a new point of competition. At the time, I was disappointed to see how little was done in redesign of products in other countries, but I supposed in countries that had their own oil, like the U.S. and Britain, such a crisis did not have the heavy impact on every single citizen that it did in Japan. We realized that if we were cut off, we were finished. Some of the most pessimistic people were warning that Japan would have to be prepared to go back to its agrarian roots if worse came to worst. Realistically, we knew that there would be oil, at a price, but we knew that changes had to be made. We could no longer be extravagant, and our dreams of continued economic growth might be cut short. In fact, the first oil embargo dropped our real gross national product growth from 8.8 percent in 1973—the highest of the industrialized countries—to -1 percent in 1974, the biggest growth loss among those countries that year.

  Because of the crisis, we became efficient. Using the latest technologies, we designed lighting that consumed less power and more efficient generators. Soon people who visited the Ginza and saw the blazing lights there and other places around the country could hardly believe that we were burning less energy. Factories learned to recycle waste heat and gases and how to make products with less energy. Automobile fuel efficiency was greatly increased by new technology. And soon we began to realize that we could get more efficiency out of a barrel of crude oil than almost anybody else.

  One interesting aspect of the oil situation is that because our country is small, we use less oil for transportation than for industrial purposes, whereas in the United States the situation is reversed. There, more than half of every barrel of crude oil is used for transportation. For a time, we envied the British for having their own North Sea oil, but as oil prices plunged and a glut hit the world in the eighties, Britain’s expensive North Sea oil became a burden on the country. We are still 99.7 percent dependent on imports for oil, 100 percent dependent for aluminum, iron ore, and nickel, over 95 percent dependent for copper, and over 92 percent dependent for natural gas. We cannot get away from our worry about being cut off, and we attempt to keep at least a 100-day supply of oil in storage tanks and parked supertankers, just in case something should happen. This is prudent, of course, but it is also. I believe, a legacy of our recent agrarian past and sense of vulnerability.

  When you are told from childhood on that the metal object you hold in your hands comes from iron ore mined in countries far away, which is transported to Japan at great expense and is produced in furnaces that use gas and coal from other faraway places, such objects seem very valuable. In America it may be practical to make a production run of, say, automobile axles, check them later and discard the ones that do not pass inspection. In Japan simple economics do not allow us to do this. Our general philosophy throughout industry in Japan is that everybody is an inspector and that the goods being made must be made correctly at every single stage of the operation. This is natural to us. It is a cautious and conservative philosophy, but it has worked well for us. In America a certain number of rejects is expected, but we have always tried to avoid a single reject. You can imagine how concerned we were, back in the 1950s, when we had so few resources, when the number of usable pieces in the total production of our first transistors was only 5 percent. The major mission of everybody involved, day and night, was to get that yield up over 90 percent, which we did in a matter of months. I discovered very early that for Sony the cost of after-service overseas was so expensive that quality assurance at every stage of manufacture was cheaper in the long run.

  I also learned that the attitude in America is much more easygoing as far as raw materials are concerned than in Japan. America has so much of everything— oil, coal, copper, gold, uranium, timber—that even today Americans do not seem to take conservation seriously. I am reminded of the American expression, “There’s plenty more where that came from.” We have no such expression.

  Our people also seem naturally more concerned about precision. It may have something to do with the meticulousness with which we must learn to write the complicated characters of our language. But for whatever reason, when we tell one of our Japanese employees that the measurement of a certain part must be within a tolerance of plus or minus five, for example, he will automatically strive to get that part as close to zero tolerance as possible. When we started our plant in the United States, we found that workers would follow instructions perfectly. But if we said make it between plus or minus five, we would get it somewhere near plus or minus five all right, but rarely as close to zero as the Japanese workers did. We discussed what to do about this, and in no time had the answer. For the U.S. specifications, we just set the tolerance at plus or minus two, and in that range the American workers consistently gave us what we needed. If we have the need and demand zero tolerance from the American workers, we can get it if we specify it.

  I do not for a moment discredit the foreign worker. Sometimes you have to use a different approach where people are accustomed to different approaches. I am sure American executives who have dealt with Japanese workers in Japan have had equally interesting experiences. When we started assembly of Trinitron sets in San Diego, we were working with employees who were inexperienced, and we were, of course, concerned with quality. We had to impress on these new workers just what we expected of them and also why. We discussed it with our operating executives there, Mike Morimoto, Junichi Kodera, and Ron Dishno, who were going to be responsible for the assembly operation. The answer was simple: show each employee what would happen to the set if his or her operation wasn’t done properly. Sets were made with a certain poorly wired joint, for example, and the employees dealing with that part of the assembly could see what was wrong with the picture and trace it back to the source, a poor solder joint or connector, or whatever. Very soon we were getting the same quality in the U.S. that we were getting in Japan. For a time after we opened our plant at Bridgend in Wales, we were shipping the locally made parts back to Japan for inspection and then returning them to the British plant for assembly, until we were certain that all the parts were up to standard.

  We Japanese have always been eager to develop our own technology, absorb aspects of technology from abroad, and blend them to make suitable objects or systems. We still use Chinese characters in our language, together with a purely Japanese syllabary, which overlays the rather simple Chinese grammar with our own very complex one. The second of our syllabaries is designed to pronounce foreign words phonetically. Any new foreign word can be brought into the language this way, with our own way of pronouncing it, of course, but without having to create a string of Chinese characters to approximate the sound. Written Japanese is also a simple language to speedread because to get a quick sense of what a piece of writing is about, all that is needed is a quick scan of the Chinese characters. That is technology, too.

  It was an accident that several Portuguese we
re aboard a Chinese trading ship (or maybe a pirate ship—we are not sure) that stopped in 1543 at the tiny Japanese island of Tanegashima, off the southern coast of Kyushu, for supplies. The Portuguese had two matchlock guns with them and they went hunting on the island while the ship was being provisioned. When Tokitaka, the lord of the lonely island, saw these new weapons, he insisted on learning more about them. The Portuguese apparently agreed to teach him how to shoot, and by the time they were ready to leave, Tokitaka decided he had to have both guns, for which he paid the Portuguese a very high price. He ordered his head swordsmith to make duplicates, and so firearms were introduced into Japan. It is said that within a few years the Japanese version of the Portuguese weapon, now called a Tanegashima in Japan, was better than the original, something for which I cannot vouch.

  Japan had a long fascination with guns that ended tragically in 1945, and today Japan is the least-armed of the world’s industrialized nations. Lord Tokitaka’s island, perched close to our southernmost main island in the Pacific Ocean, turned out to be a geographically logical position for the establishment of the National Space Development Agency’s launching site, where its newest rockets launch communications and weather satellites. It is an irony of history that Tanegashima has pioneered leading-edge technology for Japan twice. The technology being explored from the island today puts tools for survival into our hands, such as the ability to communicate with the rest of the world through geostationary satellites, and meteorological satellites that give crucial weather data and solar observations that we share with other countries in the Western Pacific.

  In the sixteenth century, Japanese soldiers led by Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded Korea, and among the people brought back to Japan were Korean potters and other craftsmen who had perfected different kinds of ceramics and metalwork using techniques not then used in Japan, which they taught Japanese craftsmen. The Japanese thirst for technology has, then, always been great. I have already mentioned the period of the Meiji restoration, when we sought everything we could find by way of new technology from the West, and we learned how to make all sorts of new things, from hoopskirts to locomotives.

  But my idea of technology and its usefulness for mankind does not start with the latest inventions of whatever age. You can have great technology and not know how to make proper use of it. And you can have simple technology and it can save your life.

  On a January day in 1974, a couple of fishermen were walking through the reeds in a lonely spot near the Talofofo River on the island of Guam, on their way to set some shrimp traps, when they noticed some unusual motion nearby. They stopped and waited. In a few moments, the reeds parted, and out darted a short, wiry, bearded man in a kind of burlap uniform. Startled to see the fishermen, he dropped his traps and raised his hands in a prayerful gesture, then lunged at one of the men. The two subdued this strange creature and tied his hands. At the local police station, he drew himself to attention and identified himself as Corporal Yoichi Yokoi of the Imperial Japanese Army Supply Corps. He had gone into hiding when the American forces retook Guam in 1944 and had eluded detection and capture for twenty-eight years. He told an incredible story of survival.

  Yokoi had been a tailor before being drafted in 1941. He served in a supply unit in China before being transferred to Guam in March 1944, not long before its fall. After American troops recaptured the island, he was presumed dead by Japanese military authorities and was posthumously promoted to sergeant. A memorial tablet was placed in his family’s Buddhist altar, but both of his parents died believing he was still alive. Except for anemia, he was in excellent health. All he wanted to eat when he was taken to the hospital was “something salty.” He had gone twenty-eight years without the taste of salt. He bathed in and took his drinking water from a small stream near his cave. He dug the cave eight feet below ground level using a spent artillery shell as a shovel; he shored up the roof with bamboo; and he fashioned drains and a latrine for sanitation.

  He had been ordered to burn his army uniform when the island was taken by the Americans, and he and two others had retreated to the deserted end of the island. The other two lived separately, he said, and died years before Yokoi was discovered. For his clothing he stripped the pliable bark from pago trees and made thread of it, which he wove into cloth on a makeshift loom. Then he cut the cloth with the tailoring scissors he had saved and sewed trousers, shirts, and jackets. He made needles by pounding and shaping pieces of brass cartridges. He found a discarded American ammunition box and some spent machine gun shells, which he used as containers. He found bits of discarded junk floating in the river and, on the shore, a piece of cloth, some wire, a Schlitz can. Wire made belt buckles, plastic made buttons. He squeezed oil from coconut pulp, and used the coconut shells for containers.

  He also learned to make fire by rubbing sticks together, and kept fire by weaving a rope of coconut fiber. Once lit the rope would smolder for days and could be used to start a cooking fire by blowing on it. He ate an occasional wild rat he trapped in a handmade snare. He also captured a deer every once in a while and smoked the meat over his hearth in a basketlike contraption he devised to cut down the amount of smoke that could escape through his ventilation shaft. He trapped fresh-water shrimp and fish and managed to grow some vegetables.

  Yokoi came home to a hero’s welcome. He got his back pay, wrote a book, and now he makes personal appearances, lecturing on living with nature.

  Few of us can expect to have to duplicate Sergeant Yokoi’s ordeal, fortunately. I recount this story of his survival to make the point I began with, that technology can be directly related to survival at its most elemental level. Technology refers not only to the marvels that make life so comfortable for us today.

  II

  Perhaps it is because of our need for the means of survival that Japanese science tends to concentrate more on the applied than on the theoretical. We have taken many basic ideas and turned them into practical objects, in many cases products not even thought of by the originators of the basic technology. This is inevitable, of course. A good example in Sony’s history is the way we transformed the transistor for radio uses. Today we are developing new materials for uses in machines that are not off the drawing board, but that we know will be needed along the developmental time line.

  The biggest difficulty is moving a new technology into people’s lives. Once the public recognizes the advantage this technology brings, they come to expect it. What housewife would want to go back to the washboard? For another example, until computers and on-board microprocessors were common, few people realized that they could have automobiles that use so much less fuel, that ride so comfortably, and that are safer because of better engineering made possible by computers. For safety, many models now have sensors that turn on the lights automatically at dusk, and windshield wipers that start up when the first drops of rain fall. Smaller, more economical engines are made possible because very small on-board computers make them so efficient. Ceramic parts are appearing more and more in auto engines, making them more heat-resistant and more durable. New plastics are replacing steel. Optical fiber will soon replace copper and aluminum wire in electrical systems. We have cars that warn us verbally when a system or component is in a dangerous condition, if a door is open, the fuel is low, and so on. And we have automatic direction finders coordinated with a map on a cathode ray tube display on the dashboard. We have a CD ROM (read only memory) disk that holds thousands of maps, which will pinpoint the car’s position on the map display, moving in real time as you drive along. With this device, it should be impossible to get lost. I expect there will be crash avoidance systems and a whole lot more, and all because a small microprocessor with great capacity is put on board.

  However, considering everything that has been done with automobiles, and allowing for all the added aids and conveniences to come, there is little in the basic nature of the auto that is likely to change. Four wheels, an engine, and a body will remain standard for personal ground transportation,
and the automakers are approaching a peak. All of the improvements in some way go to make automobiles safer than ever before, better, and more reliable, but the automobiles soon will not really be very different from each other, as their reliability continues to improve. From the viewpoint of someone interested in merchandising, I believe that people are growing accustomed to these automotive advances—the general public expects them —and styling will become the main difference in consumers’ minds. The technological improvement is taken for granted, as it should be, as it progresses and becomes a part of our lives.

  When I began driving a car, the act itself was almost a specialized technology, and to pass the examination I had to know all about the mechanics of the engine and the drive train. Today this is not necessary. We rely on specialists to fix our cars if and when they give us trouble. Sometimes I regret that it has become impossible to tinker with a car engine, but then the compensation is that I don’t have to park my car on a hill at night so I can get it started the next morning; I have other things to which I can devote my time. People my age and even younger can still remember when having a flat tire was common. Today it is rare.

  I remember when people were constantly having to replace the vacuum tubes and other parts in their radios and early television sets, when drugstores and variety stores in the United States had testing machines where people could bring suspect vacuum tubes from their ailing TV sets, check them, and buy replacements if necessary. All this has disappeared with the advent of the transistor, diode, semiconductor, integrated circuit, and better production systems for assembling the sets. Automatic soldering machines and better and finer quality control, in addition to new materials that are more durable and more reliable, have greatly diminished service needs.