Akio Morita

Akio Morita grew up with two futures in the house. As the eldest son of a family that had brewed sake for nearly four centuries, he was expected to become its fifteenth-generation head. His father, Kyuzaemon, began preparing him for that responsibility. His mother, Shu, filled the home with Western classical records. The family’s electric phonograph drew Akio toward a different kind of work.

He began teaching himself from books and magazines, then built a crude electric phonograph, a radio receiver, and an early recording device. The interest became an obsession. Morita later wrote that he spent nearly every after-school hour on electronics while geography, history, and Japanese fell below average. His mother was called to school repeatedly. The principal objected to his indifference toward conventional studies, and Morita sat at the front of the classroom with its lowest-ranked pupils. He nearly flunked out.

His parents did not pretend the imbalance was harmless. When his results became especially poor, they scolded him and ordered him to put away the electronics. Morita complied until his grades recovered, then returned to the circuits. The same cycle happened more than once. The boundary was plain: the work he loved could continue, but not by abandoning every obligation around it.

In his final year of middle school, Morita announced that he would sit the science entrance examinations for the selective Eighth Higher School. His science and mathematics marks were strong; his overall record was not. Teachers and parents were surprised. Morita spent a year studying intensely with tutors and gained admission, becoming, by his own account, the lowest-ranked graduate of his school ever admitted to that science department. He went on to study physics at Osaka Imperial University.

The family obligation did not disappear. After the Second World War, Morita wanted to join engineer Masaru Ibuka in a small new company in Tokyo. Morita was twenty-five, and Ibuka expected the sake business to be the immovable obstacle. He and a colleague traveled overnight to speak with Kyuzaemon.

Kyuzaemon acknowledged that he had long wanted his eldest son to succeed him. Then he changed the plan. “Whatever it is you want to do the most, do it,” Sony’s official history records him saying. He later became a financial backer and one of the older advisers who watched over the young company’s affairs. A younger son volunteered to take on the brewing business.

Morita and Ibuka founded Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation in 1946 with about twenty people and 190,000 yen in capital. The company introduced Japan’s first tape recorder and transistor radio, became Sony in 1958, and expanded into a global electronics business. That outcome was not visible from the principal’s office, and it does not make the neglected schoolwork wise in retrospect.

Morita’s family changed what it supplied as the evidence changed. During school, it was a limit: repair the work you are avoiding before returning to the circuits. Years later, after study and work had turned the obsession into a credible plan, it was permission, advice, and money. Both responses asked the same thing of Morita: make the interest responsible to other people.