Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs

by Simon Winchester

  Finally, his new company would help his country. Its formally stated national intent was to help “reconstruct Japan, and to elevate the nation’s culture through dynamic cultural and technological activities.”

  Yet this high-flown language—in truth more Grandisonian than grandiloquent, as the firm’s later progress would show—masked many early difficulties. Neither Ibuka the man nor Totsuko his company had any real idea what to make. The first invention was a crude electric rice cooker, no more than a wooden tub with a flat aluminum element at its bottom. You poured in rice and water, plugged in the device, and the mixture’s conducting wetness triggered the switch that powered up the heating element. The rice was cooked and duly dried, and the nonconducting dryness broke the circuit and switched the device off. It was in theory a fine and clever idea—except, the vagaries of the year’s crop made it almost impossible to cook the rice properly. Sometimes it was fully cooked, sometimes not. Sometimes the machine switched itself off while the rice was still wet, like porridge. At other times the cooked rice was quite dry but had the consistency of a fistful of shotgun pellets. As a result, Totsuko’s first foray into the mercantile world was a complete dud, and the hundreds of rice cookers languished unbought on the office shelves, for years.

  But before long the firm did in fact find its feet, once Ibuka had insisted that instead of flailing around with some truly eccentric ideas (building miniature golf courses on bomb sites, selling sweetened miso soup), his engineers stick to their core pursuit: electronics. So, by the end of 1946, when Akio Morita, newly released from the navy, joined his new friend’s firm, the business model swiftly focused the minds of all the employees on one particular and widespread electronic need: the repair of radio sets.

  All Japanese households owned radios, but during the war some had been damaged by the bombings, and others had been destroyed by the much-feared Japanese secret police, the Kempeitai, who had campaigned to stop civilians from listening to American shortwave propaganda. Now, with peace returned, households wanted cheerful music; they wanted to hear such news as the American censors allowed (official announcements, information), and radio was the obvious best means of disseminating it. So Ibuka and his team—now swollen to more than twenty, outgrowing their one-room premises to fill one floor of the old department store—began doing real business. A reporter from Asahi Shimbun stopped by. Ibuka, with his shrewd sense of what made good PR, must have delighted in the resulting article, which described his radio repair business and reported that the work was being performed “quite apart from any commercial motive.” The door was soon thronged by customers bearing broken radios.

  Steadily the inventive energies accelerated—as did the quality of the technical work. The firm first made a voltmeter that was mundane enough in its own right, but cleverly enough designed and built that it got the attention of occupation forces’ quartermasters, who sent samples back to America to be used as benchmarks of technical excellence. Suddenly a Japanese machine was winning kudos beyond Japan. Then Ibuka, swelling with pride, made the first fully functioning and complex electrical device that would perform the kind of task for which the firm would eventually win worldwide fame. He made a tape recorder.

  This machine was expensive both to develop and to construct, but it eventually sold in respectable numbers. He was able to build it because Akio Morita and his old, rich, and highly traditional family decided to put money, serious money, into the young company. It was the firm’s first investment, at the now-legendary sum of 190,000 yen. The Morita Company, run at the time by the fourteenth generation of farmer-dynasts, had for centuries concentrated on businesses sacred to the spirit of the nation: on the growing, harvesting, and storage of rice and soybeans and on the delicate brewing of sake, miso, and soy sauce. Yet now, and with remarkable prescience, the clan elders were able to discern a future of a very different kind. Helped in addition by an abiding faith in the artless genius of Masaru Ibuka, the family chiefs felt a stirring of commercial possibility—and instructed their son and presumed heir1 to join the new firm as partner, and go back down to Tokyo and utterly transform the Pacific world.

  Ibuka was fascinated by the idea that the human voice, music, the sounds of daily life, could all be mysteriously transplanted onto a length of thin brown tape and played back through a loudspeaker. He first saw a tape recorder—a concept that had been born in Germany a decade before—at the American censors’ office at the main Tokyo radio station. He did not know how it had been done—maybe the tape was plastic; probably it was in some way magnetic; maybe magnets were employed in some fashion to spread the sound onto the tape. However it was made, though, and whatever the magic of the tape itself, he could easily imagine the possibilities of such a device. It would be ideal for education, for training, even for what was then so keenly needed in Japan: sheer entertainment. He vowed that the firm would build and sell such a machine, whatever the cost, whatever the likelihood of immediate profit.

  Masaru Ibuka, a lifelong collector of model trains, ham radios, and helium balloons, was the engineering genius behind the first Japanese transistor radio, and later the Trinitron and the Walkman—and the cofounder of Sony Corporation.* [Associated Press.]

  It took a while for the company’s accounting chief, a dour man sent down from Nagoya to look after the family’s investment, to sign off on the project. Morita and Ibuka infamously took him to a black market restaurant and got him drunk enough to agree. Once the money was available, the team sat down to solve the technical challenges.

  Obtaining tape was the greatest problem, and from the outset the company decided it should manufacture the tape, rightly anticipating that owners of the recorders would need to buy ever more reels of the stuff. The plastic that was used in the American recorders was simply not available in Japan. Cellophane, which could be found, stretched, and so was useless. The only other available substance that could be magnetized was paper. So a specialized papermaking company was found in Osaka, thousands of sheets of the smoothest available craft paper were ordered, and Morita and Ibuka settled down to cut them into countless narrow strips.

  The strips were then glued together and laid out on the factory floor—hundreds of feet of them, weighted to stop them from blowing about. All thirty-six of the company employees—the voltmeter business had nearly doubled the staff count—now armed with brushes made of fine raccoon belly hair, fell to their knees and, their heads bowed like monks in a scriptorium, applied with infinite care a magnetic paste concocted from a mixture of ferric oxide and geisha-quality white face powder. There was a down-home aspect to the business: the ferric oxide had been cooked up in frying pans; the powder had been bought wholesale from a cosmetics company.

  The resulting pasted tape was left overnight to dry, and then tested the next morning by being run over magnets connected to speakers. The result was the so-called talking paper—fragile, scratchily imperfect in the first tests, but increasingly more workable as the cutters and the gluers and the brush wielders got better at their tasks. The acceptable batches were then wound onto reels, and these were placed on a hefty machine that had been cobbled together from motors and magnets, and was equipped with an external microphone and a built-in loudspeaker.

  Finally, here was the prototype of the Totsuko Company’s G-type tape recorder, a bulky hundred-pound confection of steel and copper and glass and raccoon-hair-pasted paper tape. It worked, quite reliably. It would both record and play back whatever the microphone picked up. So the firm painstakingly hand-built fifty recorders, priced at 160,000 yen each—more than twice what was then the annual Japanese salary—and then crossed its corporate fingers. The dour Morita Company accounting chief, back again from the countryside and by now wise enough to remain sober, waited nervously to see how the market would react and whether his masters’ investment was secure.

  If it was, it was more by luck than judgment. Sales were painfully slow. Everyone who saw and heard the device was impressed. A noodle shop bought the very fi
rst and tried to encourage a primitive form of karaoke, which drew in crowds of diners. But few others wanted something so heavy or so costly.

  The company then began doing what it subsequently became famous for, something that the Japanese people had been doing for centuries: shrinking things. The old notions—the neatly nested lacquered box, the tightly concertina’d fan, the foldable-to-nothing room screen—were for the first time translated into this electronic corner of the Japanese corporate world. The first giant tape recorder—those few of the original fifty that did sell went to the government and into the courts, for transcription—was cunningly distilled into something that was neater, lighter, and very much smaller. This second version was called the Model H, for “home.” It weighed just thirty pounds and cost eight thousand yen. It was followed by the Model M, which was designed to suit the fledgling movie industry; and finally, by the truly popular and successful Model P, a cheap and miraculously how-do-they-do-it? lightweight portable tape recorder, with a shoulder strap and an appearance of near-chic modernity—which started selling at the rate of six thousand units each year.

  With figures like these, and the firm’s newfound ability to come up with new and smaller models and then swivel its production lines to satisfy public demand at what seemed a moment’s notice, the little company could afford to rent more space and hire more people. By the end of the 1940s, Totsuko had a staff of almost five hundred and had expanded offices in a former barrack block in a hilly western suburb, where the company is still based six decades later.

  Shrinking the product seemed to have been the key. The engineers who mastered the mysteries of squeezing more and more features into smaller and smaller volumes were the early heroes of the story. But in later years, they were to be greatly assisted by an invention from the late 1940s—an American invention, as it happens—that would allow the small to be made tiny, the tiny minuscule, and for a real electronic revolution to get itself properly under way.

  This was the transistor. This small, simple, and now all too easily made electronic amplifying device is widely accepted as one of the greatest of all modern inventions. It is an essential in the making of all today’s computers, is key to the birth of the Pacific coast technologies of Microsoft and Apple and more generally of Silicon Valley (so named, since 1974, as silicon is the transistor’s core material), and helped light the fuse of Japan’s postwar success. It was invented, all agree, on December 23, 1947. A trio of electronics engineers, who would later win the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery, made the first working transistor where they were employed, at Bell Labs, in Murray Hill (a New Jersey suburb founded by a spritzer maker who had migrated there from Murray Hill, in Manhattan). It was one of the last gasps of Atlantic coast inventiveness in a field of technology that would become increasingly dominated by the much greater ocean to the west.

  It took Drs. Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley2 years of intense application to maneuver the tiny slivers of semiconducting germanium and the even tinier conducting electrodes of pure gold leaf into performing their magical feats of amplification. But once they had achieved this world-changing miracle, the vacuum tube (that fragile, hot, cumbersome, and slow-to-warm-up valve that had managed to switch and amplify electrical signals before) was effectively retired, to be replaced by the semiconductor and the new-made transistor. Once such transistor-based circuitry could be integrated onto single pieces of silicon, eventually allowing thousands and then millions of transistors to be etched onto a slice of semiconductor no larger than a fingernail, the modern high-technology world, or at least a substantial part of it, began to assume the complexion it still has today.

  Masaru Ibuka became immediately intrigued by what he learned of the transistor. News of its invention trickled into the Japanese papers, though initially the only suggested use most could imagine—a use that took advantage of its tininess—was in the making of hearing aids, which were seldom worn in Japan. So in 1952, when Ibuka went on his first-ever journey to the United States—“[A] stunning country!” he reported. “Really fantastic. Buildings brightly lit. Streets jammed with automobiles”—he was not initially bound for Murray Hill. The sole official purpose of his expedition was to see how tape recorders, then still the company’s core (and really, only) business, were being used.

  He worked hard. He discovered many new uses for the recorder, and each time, he sent telegrams back to Tokyo demanding action, and Morita would invariably comply. One suggestion was to start making recordings in stereo. Within days, Morita’s engineers had solved some trivial technical challenges, whereupon Morita himself, exhibiting his soon to be legendary marketing acumen, cleverly approached NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster, and offered it equipment that would allow it to present a thirty-minute radio broadcast in this newfangled stereophonic manner. On December 4, 1952, NHK introduced its stereo experiment, “produced” as the continuity announcer solemnly intoned, “by Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation and NHK.” It was a stunning success. Thousands heard it and responded with unalloyed enthusiasm. “Our cat, who had been sleeping on the foot-warming table,” wrote one listener, “was shocked by the sound-effects and jumped out of the room.” The reports were telegraphed to America, and back to a clearly elated Ibuka.

  By chance he was now coming toward the end of his expedition. He was staying at the Taft Hotel in New York—and on a night now famous in company lore, was being kept relentlessly awake by loud music from the Roxy Theatre nearby. Lying sleepless in his hotel bed, he suddenly connected two ideas that were floating through his mind.

  First, Western Electric, parent company of Bell Labs, the inventor of the transistor, had just announced that it was looking to license outside companies to produce transistors in bulk. Second, Ibuka knew he had more than forty newly hired scientists of exceptional brainpower still tweaking the finer points of the company’s tape recorders, but with not a great deal else to occupy their minds. So, without asking for anyone’s agreement back home, he spent his final hours in America applying for the necessary production license—characteristically dismissing the idea that anyone at company HQ might balk at the twenty-five-thousand-dollar fee being demanded for it.

  He must have pondered the matter more deeply as his Northwest Airlines DC-6 thundered westward toward and then across the Pacific, and whenever he got out to stretch his legs in the increasing chill of the airports at Minneapolis and Edmonton, Anchorage and Shemya, a lonely and gale-swept U.S. Air Force outpost in the Aleutian Islands. When finally he arrived back at Haneda Airport two days later, he was convinced: “Radios,” he declared to the assembled senior staff. “We are going to make this transistor. And we are going to use it to make radios—radios that are small enough so that each individual will be able to carry one around for his own use, with a power that will enable civilization to reach even those areas that have no electric power yet.”

  A stunned silence greeted his announcement. “Too wild, too risky” was how one of the company managers summed up their reactions. Maybe the established, big-time companies (Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Hitachi) could make them. They already had licensed agreements with Bell to make their own transistors, and they had the resources to do so. But not tiny Totsuko, the new kid on the block.

  There were financial and bureaucratic problems—getting twenty-five thousand dollars out of the company coffers was trying enough; getting these dollars wired out of currency-starved Japan was at first well-nigh impossible. There were also technical problems, which Ibuka solved through determination and prescience, but also with the help of the figure who would become the third member of the triumvirate of titans of this story, a brilliant young geophysicist and volcanologist named Kazuo Iwama. He came from the government’s main seismological observatory, and like everyone else at Totsuko, he knew next to nothing about semiconductors.

  But Iwama proved to be a phenomenally quick study. He and Ibuka flew back to America in the summer of 1954, to learn more about transistor technology, the
revenue from tape recorder sales covering their hotel bills and food. The Sony Archives today hold the fruits of that three-month visit: four fat file folders crammed with hundreds upon hundreds of blue one-page onionskin paper air mail letters that Kazuo Iwama sent back, often several at a time, every single day.

  The letters are crammed with detail, tissue-thin Rosetta stones of jumbled numbers, arcane formulas, Chinese ideographs, Japanese phonetic scripts, and a scattering of English words and phrases, together with fine filigree drawings of crucibles and diagrams of oscillators and depictions of circuitry that give the letters the appearance of some strange new art form, the designs for the future of an exotic new world. “Zone leveling single crystal,” one letter reads. “Pure paraffin wax,” another. “Detexile paper—no sulfur.” The assembled papers constitute a small encyclopedia of transistor wisdom, a distillate of all that was then known in America about this magical new device. And in 1954, all of it headed westward to Japan, there to help create an economic, eventually transpacific revolution.

  There were other challenges. Even in the early 1950s, the Japanese still felt something of a sense of cultural cringe, a pervasive lack of self-confidence. Years of hard work and dedication had improved the appearance of most Japanese cities, but the shame and humiliation of the war still exerted a powerful drag on progress. Morita recalls being in Germany—noting how rapidly it had rebuilt its own ruined cities—and having a shopkeeper in Düsseldorf offer him an ice cream with a miniature paper parasol stuck in it, remarking kindly that it came from his country. Is this all we are good for? he asked himself. Is this what the world thinks of us?

  Yet it was rather more complicated than this. I am sure I am not alone in believing that many East Asian sciences, in particular, have long suffered, have long been held back, by the basic Asian concept of “face,” of what the Japanese term mentsu. This (which, very broadly, relates to the giving of respect and the protection of one’s own dignity and regard) plays a profoundly important role in the social exchanges of many countries in the northwestern Pacific. The socially lethal consequences of losing face or, more dangerously, of causing others to lose it, may well have inhibited certain kinds of scientific progress, in large part because such consequences militate against experimentation, which invariably embraces failure, even public failure. Picking oneself up and beginning again, making the experiment subtly different, and performing many experiments until finally one works—such is the essence of scientific advance. And this was not always an easy concept for Asian scientists to accept.