Pacific

by Simon Winchester

  The containers were eventually to be crammed with much more than cartons of simple radio sets. The inventions that would be dreamed up by Masaru Ibuka and his swiftly expanding teams of engineers included microphones and videocassettes, computers and video cameras, games and storage devices, and a thousand other essentially inessential gadgets for the improvement of the daily lot of lots of people. The Walkman—a tape player that didn’t record, seen initially as a heresy for a company that had made its name by recording sounds and not simply playing them—was a worldwide success.6 The Trinitron—which Ibuka said later was the creation of which he was most proud—made full-color high-quality television inexpensively available to all.

  A change in perception also started to occur as this steady stream of new products began to emerge from the Sony engineering benches. In the immediate postwar years, Asian countries were seen largely as peddlers of the shoddy, the gimcrack, and the second-rate. But now, with the inventions being shipped eastward by Sony and its like, Japan was swiftly winning quite another reputation, a name for itself such as it had never enjoyed before: for being a past master of the precise, the particular, and the highly accurate. All these devices, at least in the firm’s early days (and this applies to the products of most of the other Japanese firms as well), were made with the kind of precision that was more readily associated with products made in Europe, especially in Switzerland and Germany.

  Japan was a society built on traditions born largely of nature: of working in bamboo and water; of tatami and silk; of ceramics and flower arranging and the presentation of tea and the hammering of razor-sharp sweeps of steel; of adapting a natural world that, ipso facto, existed utterly without mathematical perfection, without straight lines. Now, all of a sudden, and thanks to men such as Ibuka, Morita, and Iwama, this country was becoming known for its masters of precision, for its ability to work with germanium and titanium and the pitiless certainties of the micrometer, the caliper, and the vernier scale—and yet never for a moment abandoning its intimacy with nature and the charming, spiritually important imprecisions of the natural world. The dexterity with which the Japanese bridged that gap—to employ and revere both titanium and bamboo, the die-straight and the gently curved—says much about the Pacific Ocean more generally.

  For the Pacific had become some kind of cultural meeting place, for a certain kind of marriage—whether permanent or temporary, it was then too early to say, and with details and conclusions to be teased out. It would be a marriage of, on the one hand, a congeries of ancient natural cultures, most of them animist in origin, that permeate and define those countries that make up what the West likes to call the East; and on the other, the more numerically based, more ruthlessly practical capitalist and Judeo-Christian cultures that tend to dominate America, the American West, and what indeed Western peoples more roundly like to call the West.

  As far as Sony was concerned, the company seemed first to enjoy and exult in its success, but then later to pay and suffer the often inevitable price of the pioneer. It first rose in public esteem on what seemed an impossibly steep trajectory. It soared with seeming effortlessness through the twentieth century. Its founders died and were honored and memorialized. Akio Morita is widely remembered; Masaru Ibuka, the true creator, rather less so. Then the company began to stutter, to lose velocity and altitude; and it commenced, in the first years of the new century, a long and painfully public decline, with assets sold, management changed, unwise ventures attempted. There came an all-too-regular litany of apologies, meetings dominated by the deep bowing of abject sorrow offered in silence by sad and dignified men who felt they had let everyone down. No excuses, though. No blame attached to others. Just acceptance and endurance, as is the Japanese way.

  Sony was hardly alone in its sufferings. The consumer electronics business turned out to be a field of extraordinary competitive brutality. The Japanese companies—Sony, of course, but also Matsushita, Sanyo, Sharp, Toshiba, Panasonic, and a host of others—had at first vanquished the Americans. Their impeccable Japanese-made products and adroit marketing campaigns had reduced firms such as RCA, Magnavox, Zenith, and Sylvania to quivering wrecks, and eventually made them curl up, wither, and perish. The Japanese then assumed lead position and, from the western Pacific, commanded the heights of this new world order.

  Then, as is the way of things today, the Japanese began to cede ground as well. First they lost ground in the making of products, and companies based in Korea and Taiwan, firms such as Samsung and Foxconn, began to create devices quite as impeccable and revolutionary as those the Japanese had made, but for much less money. Second, the new Japanese firms weren’t generating as many innovative products, a development that presented an opportunity for American companies, of which Apple had to be the most vivid example, to step into that space. If the transistor radio was the electronic icon of the sixties, and the Trinitron its counterpart in the eighties, then the twenty-first-century equivalents were the iPod, iPad, and iPhone—all conceived in and around the Pacific Ocean, but now on the other side, in America.

  I first saw Tokyo Bay at close hand in the late 1980s. It is a remarkable sight at any time, but on this windy and cold blue-sky day in early spring, it was memorably so. I had taken the rattling Japan Railways train out to the town of Futtsu, on the bay’s eastern side, on the inner limb of the Boso Peninsula and the old volcanic hills that protect Tokyo from in-sweeping ocean storms. There is a spit of land, now Futtsu Park, where it is said the first American servicemen landed after the 1945 surrender. Its breakwater was slippery that morning, with water blown up by the stiff westerly breeze, and the entrance to Tokyo Bay was a confusion of dark blue water and white horses, spume lifting off the wave crests. In the distance, shockingly familiar, was the symmetric exactness of the cone of Fuji, the summit slopes blinding white with the sun reflected on new-fallen snow. The wind had blown the city smoke and fumes well away, and the view was perfect, rare, and serene, the mountain majestic.

  The view of the bay, helped by binoculars, had a majesty about it also. This was the world’s commerce writ large. To my left was the Uraga Channel, the six-mile-wide entrance to the Tokyo approaches. The biggest of the vessels inbound that day were all destined for one of the many ports inside the bay (Yokohama, Yokosuka, Kawasaki, Chiba, and Tokyo), each of them at the time among the busiest in the Pacific, and together, just about the busiest in the world. By the entrance to the fairway, I could see a jumble of the vessels stopped, or slowed, waiting at the pilot station, the small white shuttle boats hastening to and fro bringing yet more and more channel pilots to ease the logjam.

  The navigable channels stretched clear across my field of vision, maybe two miles from where I was standing. The inbound ships, general-cargo vessels and ore carriers and tankers and liquefied natural gas carriers rust-stained from days in mid-ocean, bringing raw materials and food and oil, were sliding home to port from left to right, from south to north, along the shipping lane closer to me. But it was the outbound vessels that caught my eye that morning—because they were nearly all of the same type, heavily laden NYK container ships piled high with twenty-foot-long and forty-foot-long boxes, all of them loaded solidly with the goods of the Japanese industry, almost all of them headed for the American West Coast.

  Once in a while a ship even larger than the last, an immense and featureless wall of green steel, eased into the shipping lane from the junction fairway from Yokohama: a car carrier laden with Toyotas, I assumed, and also en route for the United States. Some of the cars would be out on the interstates within the month, I imagined, and the stereos and cameras and televisions in the container vessels would be in the chain stores even more quickly.

  Then, maybe twice that day, and often on my subsequent visits, I saw slip out from behind the large warehouse structures across the bay in Yokosuka a warship—one time it was a destroyer; on the second occasion, an aircraft carrier. They were American naval vessels, part of the immense forces that operate from bases that have
been dotted across Japan since the end of the last war—in Okinawa; at Sasebo, near Nagasaki; at Misawa and Atsugi; and here, the biggest conglomeration of all, at Yokosuka.

  The American ships, the aircraft, and the thousands of U.S. Marines based near here are said to be perpetually ready for action anywhere in the western Pacific, at a moment’s notice. Admirals in Hawaii could order them to battle stations. Their simple existence here, in such strength, has consistently deterred any potential enemy—North Korea and China being the most likely candidates—from behaving in an unfriendly manner. And the corollary is the message that is spelled out repeatedly by the Hawaii navy headquarters: that the prosperity of Japan, and of all the allied nations nearby, had been won and sustained and underwritten and secured, in large and undeniable part, by the presence of this protective ring of battleship gray steel provided in places like this by America.

  So the cargo ships eased their way back and forth through the spume and spray, unmoved by the gathering swell. The skyscrapers of Tokyo rose to the distant north; the towers of Yokohama stood directly ahead, across the miles of sea; the smokestacks of Chiba and Kawasaki and Setagaya and Ichihara ranged all around—and all this immense enginework of commerce and prosperity was protected, so all are led to believe, by the comforting presence of the slim gray American warships that regularly emerged from their lairs, stealthy and unannounced, and sailed off to exercise, to remind, and to warn.

  I came back to Tokyo Bay almost thirty-five years later, in the summer of 2014, and this time I came by passenger ship. We were inbound from Russia and the Kuril Islands, and we had spent two days winding our way steadily south along the coast of Honshu. Our captain, in a fit of misplaced anxiety, gave the irradiated shoreline near the nuclear power plants at Fukushima a wide berth. He later said that an American liability lawyer aboard had warned him not to go too close, since any subsequent illness among the passengers could be technically ascribed to radiation, however unlikely. “You know lawyers,” the man remarked, sardonically.

  We hove to beneath the slopes of Mount Daisen and boarded the channel pilot, who looked far too young to take command of so vast a tonnage as ours. The moment we turned to starboard, and headed north toward the narrows and into Tokyo Bay, the radar on the bridge came alive with contacts, hundreds of them, ships crowding into the bay heading this way and that and at a variety of speeds: lumbering freighters, tiny gnatlike hydrofoil ferries, spinnakered yachts out for a dangerous day sail, crude-oil carriers and ore ships and a few inbound Chinese, Korean, and Evergreen container ships (the last from Taiwan) pressing against the ebbing tide.

  We got into line ahead with a few other vessels and passed the buoys into the fairway, then settled down at the regulated maximum of twelve knots, heading toward the city. There are same-way separation lanes in the Tokyo Bay fairway, so that we, a relatively fast ship, could overtake the more ponderous or the small or the underpowered. We soon found ourselves passing, rather too close for comfort, a flotilla of liquefied natural gas carriers, each with her three spherical tanks filled with highly flammable gases won from the fields off the Russian coast, north of Hokkaido.

  But in the outbound lane that hot morning—with the air too thick to see Fuji this time, the waveless waters still and greasy-looking, and Tokyo a blur through the hot brown haze—there was precious little traffic. There were ships, to be sure, but in the two hours it took us to weave our way to the turning basin and the dockside, no container ships at all. The only container vessels were inbound, and they peeled off for Yokohama.

  The statistics tell the story. Tokyo has been falling from grace as a container cargo export hub for many years. At the last count, the Japanese capital was thirty-second in the world table, just behind Colombo, just ahead of Mumbai. Yokohama was the only other port listed in the top fifty, ten places below. And a further statistic applies, giving some clue to the realization that the only container vessels I saw that summer’s day were inbound, bringing imports to Japan, and not exports bound for the rest of the world: most probably the imports were televisions and laptop computers, because, incredibly, Japan in 2014 became a net importer of such devices, forty years after essentially creating the industry and then dominating the field.

  Most probably these devices had come from China, because China has taken over most of the industries that Japan once dominated. First this dominance traveled a trifle westward, to Korea, jumping—with many Japanese engineers granted work visas to help—the sea between, on whose name neither Japan nor Korea has been able to agree for the past half century. (Korea wants the East Sea; Japan, the Sea of Japan. Neither side will budge.) Then the production of consumer electronics fled farther eastward, still across the unarguably named East China Sea, and to factories that are dotted along the eastern Chinese coast between Dalian and Hong Kong. With the result being that the largest container ports in the world, outstripping the export figures of Japanese ports by almost an order of magnitude, are now Chinese.

  Shanghai is by far the largest, eight times the capacity of Tokyo. Seven of the world’s top ten container ports are currently in China. And all the Chinese products in these great shipping boxes—aside from a small number that, like those piled high on the vessel we overtook on its slow passage into Tokyo Bay—are heading out daily, almost hourly, across the Pacific Ocean. The transoceanic momentum, a phenomenon started by the products of Masaru Ibuka’s inventive mind, is still very much in process. But the axes through which it gathers speed today are pinioned in China and the United States, and are run between ports such as Shanghai and San Francisco, Hong Kong and Los Angeles, Shenzhen and Seattle.

  Hand in hand with this evolution, a change has occurred that is potent with irony. In the days when America did so much business with Japan, it was trading with a nation that had been an enemy but had later turned into an ally. With China, it is the reverse: the nation with whom America once dealt as an ally is now considered a potential foe, a country that is presently regarded with varying degrees of suspicion, wariness, fear, and alarm.

  This could explain why, as we passed Yokosuka Naval Base off our port side, we didn’t see a single American warship. There was a lone destroyer far out at sea, but it turned out to be Japanese, part of Japan’s own newly revitalized self-defense forces. The American vessels (the carrier group of the Seventh Fleet and a host of other ancillary warships) were all far from home that day.

  Where? Though the admirals seldom tell, it is most probable that on that summer’s day they were patrolling as near to the coast of China as they comfortably could, keeping watch.

  The U.S. Navy is still paying close attention to a part of the world that evolved so radically and quickly into an economic powerhouse—an evolution that was set off when Masaru Ibuka began selling his tiny radio set in August 1955. But the eyes of the U.S. military are no longer so firmly fixed as they once were, on Japan and Korea, on the defense of Taiwan and the Philippines. Instead they are now focused, near-obsessively, on China.

  1 Akio Morita would remain connected to the family firm throughout his career at Sony, and returned without fail to the village to chair the Morita Company’s annual board meetings. He also saw to it that the family’s ancestral home and Buddhist temple were fully restored, to the delight of local villagers.

  2 Beyond the electronic world, only Shockley’s name is now widely remembered, and that mainly because of his preternatural enthusiasm for the supposed benefits (much debated and derided today) of eugenics. He also performed, for the wartime U.S. government, cold-blooded assessments of the number of likely casualties in any invasion of Japan. His official estimate—that ten million Japanese might have to be killed and that eight hundred thousand Americans might die accomplishing this—is said to have influenced the decision to drop the two atomic bombs instead.

  3 Joseph Needham (1900–1995) was a Cambridge biochemist who spent much of his life studying the origins of Chinese science. His story is told in my book The Man Who Loved China.

 
; 4 For a while, products were branded “Sony—made by Totsuko,” but in January 1958, Morita formally renamed the company Sony Corporation, despite opposition from Mitsui, the firm’s very conservative bankers. For many years afterward, Sony fought legal battles with the newly formed Tokyo-based makers of Sony Chocolate. It won.

  5 Curiously, a term not to be found, at the time of writing, in the Oxford English Dictionary, the usually omniscient accumulator of the language. Consumer society is listed, along with consumer goods, consumer research, and an ugly phenomenon, consumer terrorism, a phrase first noticed in the Pacific in 1984 after Manila police found deliberately poisoned pineapples. Consumer durables is also listed, but an editor regretting (and vowing to reverse) the absence of consumer electronics noted that consumer durables was already sounding a somewhat dated combination.

  6 With almost no marketing budget, the backers of the Walkman had to employ guerrilla tactics. Pretty young secretaries from the New York Sony offices were asked to stroll around Central Park, or to roller-skate through Union Square, while listening to their music, and wait for passersby to ask what they were doing, what they were listening to. The success is part of marketing legend.

  [Marzolino/Shutterstock, Inc.]

  Chapter 3

  THE ECSTASIES OF WAVE RIDING

  He is a Mercury, a brown Mercury. His heels are winged, and in them is the swiftness of the sea.

  —JACK LONDON, “A ROYAL SPORT: RIDING THE SOUTH SEA SURF,” IN Woman’s Home Companion, 1907

  The Pacific is a liquid place, and on most of its inhabited coastlines this liquid is warm and ultramarine and inviting. It is also by its very nature ceaselessly in motion. For centuries native peoples who lived on many of the islands of the ocean’s tropical interior have made great use of all this motion in ways that provided them with the purest joy imaginable. They rode out on long wooden boards through the beachside surf and spume and waited, floating, for a wave to lumber in from the ocean, and then stood up on the boards, toes gripping the leading edge, and from the wave’s summit crest, rode the boards down its steep green face, all the way back into shore.