[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 165 (Friday, November 19, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S15150-S15152]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      ON THE DEATH OF AKIO MORITA

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, today I rise to note the passing 
of Akio Morita, the brilliant Japanese business leader who did so much 
to rebuild his country after World War II. I ask that his obituary that 
appeared in the October 4 New York Times be printed in the Record.
  The obituary follows:
                               __________
                               

                [From the New York Times, Oct. 4, 1999]

 Akio Morita, Co-Founder of Sony and Japanese Business Leader, Dies at 
                                   78

                          (By Andrew Pollack)

       Akio Morita, the co-founder of the Sony Corporation who 
     personified Japan's rise from postwar rubble to industrial 
     riches and became the unofficial ambassador of its business 
     community to the world, died on Sunday in Tokyo. He was 78.
       Mr. Morita died of pneumonia, according to Sony. He had 
     been hospitalized in Tokyo since August, after returning from 
     Hawaii, where he had spent most of his time since suffering a 
     debilitating stroke in November 1993. More than anyone else, 
     it was Mr. Morita and his Sony colleagues who changed the 
     world's image of the term ``Made in Japan'' from one of paper 
     parasols and shoddy imitations to one of high technology and 
     high reliability in miniature packages.
       Founded in bombed-out Tokyo department store after World 
     War II, Sony became indisputably one of the world's most 
     innovative companies, famous for products like the pocket-
     sized transistor radio, the videocassette recorder, the 
     Walkman and the compact disk.
       And Mr. Morita, whose contribution was greater in marketing 
     than in technology, made the Sony brand into one of the best 
     known and most respected in the world. A Harris poll last 
     year showed Sony was the No. 1 brand name among American 
     consumers, ahead of American companies like General Electric 
     and Coca-Cola.
       A tireless traveler who moved his family to New York in 
     1963 for a year to learn American ways, Mr. Morita also 
     spearheaded the internationalization of Japanese business. 
     Sony was the first Japanese company to offer its stock in the 
     United States, in 1961, one of the first to build a factory 
     in the United States, in 1972, and still one of the only ones 
     to have even a couple of Westerners on its board.
       Sony also became a major force in the American 
     entertainment business, acquiring CBS Records in 1988 and 
     Columbia Pictures, the Hollywood studio, in 1989. The latter 
     purchase, however, turned into an embarrassing debacle as 
     Sony suffered big losses in Hollywood.


               a Japanese executive Americans recognized

       In the process, Mr. Morita, with his white mane and quick 
     tongue, became the unofficial representative of Japan's 
     business community, generally working to smooth trade 
     relations between his country and the United States, but 
     sometimes stirring resentment in both countries with his 
     pointed criticisms.
       ``He was truly a statesman par excellence in a business 
     sense,'' Mike Mansfield, the former senator and United States 
     Ambassador to Japan. ``Internationally, he did more for Japan 
     in a business sense than anyone else in Japan.''
       In Japan, Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, who was one of 
     several hundred people to visit Mr. Morita's Tokyo home 
     following his death, called Mr. Morita ``a leading figure who 
     played a pivotal role in developing Japan's postwar 
     economy,'' according to Kyodo News Service.
       Sony's current president, Nobuyuki Idei, said in a 
     statement, ``It is not an exaggeration to say that he was the 
     face of Japan.''
       To the day of his death, nearly six years after the stroke 
     that removed him from an active role in business, he was 
     still no doubt Japan's most famous business executive, and 
     the only one many Americans could name or recognize in a 
     photograph. Time magazine recently selected him as one of 20 
     ``most influential business geniuses'' of the 20th century, 
     the only non-American on the list.
       In his own country, where executives tend to be self-
     effacing, Mr. Morita was viewed as a bit flamboyant and 
     arrogant. He was the first to fly around in a corporate 
     business jet and helicopter. He appeared in a television 
     commercial for the American Express card. He served on the 
     boards of three foreign companies. He took up sports like 
     skiing, scuba diving and wind surfing in his sixties. He 
     cavorted with the rock star Cyndi Lauper after Sony bought 
     CBS Records.
       Shortly before he suffered his stroke, Mr. Morita made 
     waves in his home country by saying that Japan was like a 
     ``fortress'' and that its unique business practices were 
     alienating its trading partners.'' Although there is much to 
     commend in Japan's economic system, it is simply too far out 
     of sync with the West on certain essential points,'' he wrote 
     in The Atlantic Monthly in June 1993.
       He advocated shorter working hours, more dividends for 
     stockholders of Japanese companies and a sharp cutback in 
     government regulation. Now, as Japan struggles through an 
     economic slump that has lasted most of the decade, some of 
     what Mr. Morita advocated is being adopted.
       ``Japan was coming closer to him and seeing the need for 
     that kind of leadership,'' said Yoshihiro Tsurumi, professor 
     of international business at the Baruch Graduate School of 
     Business at the City University of New York.


               Never Comfortable In West's Business World

       Mr. Morita entertained frequently and counted many American 
     businessmen and politicians as his friends. ``He not only 
     made it Sony's business but his own personal business to 
     become intimately acquainted with American society at all 
     levels,'' said Peter Peterson, an investment banker who is on 
     Sony's board of directors. ``I can recall playing golf with 
     Akio, watching him greet and interact with every American 
     C.E.O. on the course, all of whom seemed to know him as a 
     personal friend.''
       In his book ``Sony: The Private Life'' (Houghton Mifflin, 
     1999) John Nathan suggests that Mr. Morita, a Japanese 
     traditionalist at home, was never really comfortable in the 
     Western business world.
       Mr. Nathan, a Japanese translator and University of 
     California professor of Japanese culture who was granted free 
     access to Sony executives, quotes Mr. Morita's eldest son, 
     Hideo, as saying of his father, ``He had to `act'--I'm sorry 
     to use that word but I can't help it--he had to act as the 
     most international-understanding businessman in Japan.'' But, 
     Hideo adds, ``It was never real.''
       And Sony's current president, Mr. Idei, is quoted as 
     saying: ``Japanese of the generation before mine had an 
     inferiority complex about foreigners. Akio Morita himself was 
     a living inferiority complex.''
       Despite being virtually synonymous with Sony, especially 
     outside Japan, Mr. Morita did not actually become the 
     company's president until 1971 and its chairman and chief 
     executive until 1976. Before that, he was the junior partner 
     to Masaru Ibuka, an engineering genius who, while not as 
     widely known in the West, is considered in Japan to be the 
     main founder of Sony. Mr. Ibuka died in December 1997 at the 
     age of 89.


              an early fascination leads to a career shift

       Akio Morita was born on Jan. 26, 1921, into a wealthy 
     family in Nagoya, an industrial city in central Japan. As the 
     eldest son, he was groomed from elementary school age to 
     succeed his father as president of the sake brewery that had 
     been in the family for 14 generations.
       But in junior high school, Akio became fascinated by his 
     family's phonograph, an appliance rare in Japan at that time. 
     He became an avid electronics hobbyist, building his own 
     crude phonograph and radio receiver. He studied physics at 
     Osaka Imperial University as World War II was starting. Mr. 
     Morita enlisted in the Navy under a program that would allow 
     him to do research instead of serving in combat.
       It was while developing heat-seeking weapons that Mr. 
     Morita first worked with Mr. Ibuka, 13 years his senior, who 
     before the war had started an electronic instrument company.
       After the war, Mr. Ibuka set up a new company in a bombed-
     out department store in Tokyo, making kits that converted AM 
     radios into short-wave receivers. Mr. Morita happened to read 
     a newspaper article about this and contacted his old friend. 
     The next year, when Mr. Ibuka wanted to incorporate the 
     company, he asked Mr. Morita to join.
       Mr. Morita, Mr. Ibuka and another executive traveled to the 
     Nagoya area to implore Mr. Morita's father to release his son 
     from the family business. The elder Mr. Morita not only 
     agreed, he also later became a financial backer of the new 
     company, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, or the Tokyo Telecommunications 
     Engineering Corporation, which was inaugurated on May 7, 
     1946, with an investment of about $500.
       The company produced Japan's first reel-to-reel magnetic 
     tape recorder. A few years later it licensed the rights to 
     the transistor from Bell Laboratories, after overcoming 
     resistance from the Ministry of International Trade and 
     Industry. Bell Labs officials warned that the only consumer 
     use would be for hearing aids.
       But Sony used them to produce Japan's first transistor 
     radio in 1955. (An American company, Regency, produced the 
     world's first a few months earlier but did not succeed in 
     selling it.) In 1957, Sony came out with what it termed a 
     pocket-sized transistor radio. But the radio was actually a 
     bit too big for most pockets, so Mr. Morita had Sony salesmen 
     wear special shirts with extra-large pockets.
       There followed the Trinitron television in 1968; the first 
     successful home VCR, the Betamax, in 1975; the Walkman 
     personal stereo in 1979, and the compact disk, developed with 
     Philips N.V. of the Netherlands, in 1982.
       Not all products were successful. Sony has stumbled several 
     times trying to sell personal computers. And in 1981, Mr. 
     Morita announced the Mavica, a digital camera that

[[Page S15151]]

     recorded pictures on a floppy disk instead of on film. But 
     the camera did not come to market and critics accused Mr. 
     Morita of making a premature announcement to burnish Sony's 
     image as an innovator.


                steering consumers to products they want

       Mr. Morita did not believe in market research. ``Our plan 
     is to lead the public with new products rather than ask them 
     what kind of products they want,'' he declared in his 
     autobiography, ``Made in Japan.'' (E. P. Dutton, 1986), 
     written with the journalists Edwin M. Reingold and Mitsuko 
     Shimomura. ``The public does not know what is possible, but 
     we do.''
       Mr. Morita prided himself in particular on the Walkman, the 
     portable stereo cassette player with headphones. Actually, 
     according to the company's official corporate history, it was 
     Mr. Ibuka who came up with the idea for the portable product. 
     But Mr. Morita pressed hard for the project, 
     overcoming resistance within Sony to a tape player that, 
     in its early versions, could not record. Mr. Morita, 
     despite initial reservations about the awkward name, 
     eventually ordered all Sony subsidiaries around the world 
     to begin using it.
       From the start of the company, however, Mr. Morita was much 
     more involved in marketing, while Mr. Ibuka handled 
     technology development. And from the start, he had an 
     international orientation, traveling to New York and Europe 
     in the 1950's to sell the company wares.
       Such international focus was needed because as a new 
     company, Sony had some trouble breaking into its home market, 
     where more established manufacturers had close relationships 
     with retailers. Indeed, Japan's other big postwar success, 
     the Honda Motor Company, also succeeded first in the United 
     States and to this day sells more cars in American than in 
     Japan.
       Mr. Morita soon realized that the company needed a name 
     that foreigners could pronouce and remember. So in 1958 the 
     company name was changed to Sony, derived from the Latin 
     sonus, meaning sound, and from the American vernacular 
     ``sonny boy,'' which Mr. Morita hoped would purvey a young 
     image.
       One of Mr. Morita's cardinal tenets was to foster and 
     protect the company's brand name. Early on, Bulova, the watch 
     company, said it would order 100,000 radios but would sell 
     them under its own name. Mr. Morita turned down the huge 
     order. His colleagues back in Tokyo thought he was crazy. 
     But, Mr. Morita wrote in his autobiography, ``I said then and 
     I have said it often since: It was the best decision I ever 
     made.''
       Mr. Morita's worst decision might have been with the 
     Betamax, the first successful consumer VCR. Sony did not 
     readily license its technology to other electronics 
     companies. So most of its Japanese rivals banded together 
     behind the VHS system, which offered longer recording time. 
     Eventually, the Betamax was run out of the market.
       Sony evolved into a company that, by Japanese standards at 
     least, was very Westernized, though in many ways it was 
     traditionally Japanese. All company employees, from the 
     president on down, wore company jackets, a common practice in 
     Japan. But Sony's uniforms were created by the designer Issey 
     Miyake.
       Mr. Morita first criticized some of his own country's 
     business practices in 1966, when he wrote a book published in 
     Japanese, with a title that might loosely translate as ``An 
     Essay on the Useless School Career.'' He criticized Japanese 
     companies for hiring and promoting people based only on what 
     college they had attended. Sony stopped even asking 
     applicants the name of their college, and it was one of the 
     first Japanese companies to base salaries partly on merit 
     instead of solely on seniority.


                  tried to reduce U.S. trade tensions

       Perhaps because of Sony's dependence on exports, Mr. Morita 
     tried to reduce trade tensions with the United States. In the 
     late 1960's, Sony forged a temporary joint venture with Texas 
     Instruments Inc., then the world's leading semiconductor 
     company, allowing it to set up operations in Japan.
       In 1972, Mr. Morita set up a subsidiary to export American 
     products, like Regal cookware and Whilrpool refrigerators, to 
     Japan.
       ``Selling pans and cookware and refrigerators was not our 
     bag, but Akio believed in doing something for the U.S.-Japan 
     relationship,'' said Sadami (Chris) Wada, who ran that effort 
     and then handled government relations for the Sony 
     Corporation of America for many years. The operation was 
     abandoned some years later as unsuccessful.
       In 1988, Mr. Morita founded the Council for Better 
     Corporate Citizenship, made up of Japanese companies. At a 
     time when Japanese politicians were angering African-
     Americans with insensitive remarks, one of the council's 
     first projects was to make thousands of copies of an 
     abridged version of ``Eyes on the Prize,'' the American 
     television documentary about the struggle of blacks for 
     equal rights, and distribute it to high schools in Japan.
       Mr. Morita was not adverse to using his influence among 
     American politicians and business executives to lobby for 
     Sony. He barnstormed the United States in 1984, meeting with 
     governors and with President Reagan, threatening to build 
     Sony factories only in states that did not have the ``unitary 
     tax,'' which was levied against a multinational corporation's 
     global earnings, not just those in the state. Eventually 
     California and other states scrapped the tax.
       But while Mr. Morita was often perceived as a friend of the 
     United States, he was often critical of it and proud of being 
     Japanese, flying his country's flag over Sony's New York 
     showroom when it opened in 1962. He often told a story of how 
     ashamed he was on his first trip to Germany in 1953. At a 
     restaurant, he ordered ice cream, and it was served with a 
     small paper parasol stuck in it. ``This is from your 
     country,'' the waiter said.


                hailing the success of the japanese way

       In the 1980's, when Japan seemed on top of the world, Mr. 
     Morita was among the most vocal of the Japanese executives in 
     criticizing American business and hailing the success of the 
     Japanese model.
       He said American managers were financial paper shufflers 
     who ``can see only 10 minutes ahead'' and were not interested 
     in building for the long term. And he said that because 
     American companies were losing interest in manufacturing, the 
     United States was ``abandoning its status as an industrial 
     power.'' Those factors, he said, and not trade barriers, were 
     the reason for America's trade deficit with Japan.
       ``There are few things in the United States that Japanese 
     want to buy, but there are a lot of things in Japan that 
     Americans want to buy,'' he wrote in 1989. ``This is at the 
     root of the trade imbalance. The problem arises in that 
     American politicians fail to understand this simple fact.''
       In 1989, Mr. Morita was the co-author, along with a 
     nationalist politician, Shintaro Ishihara, of ``The Japan 
     That Can Say No,'' a book that urged Japan to stand up to 
     American trade demands, which it said were motivated partly 
     by racism. The book also said Japan had the power to change 
     the world balance of power by selling its advanced computer 
     chips to the Soviet Union instead of the United States.
       Even though those strident remarks were generally in the 
     chapters Mr. Ishihara wrote, the book created a stir when an 
     unauthorized translation made its way around Washington. Mr. 
     Morita frantically backpedaled, saying the book had not been 
     intended for an American audience. And he refused to 
     authorize an English translation.


                 $3.2 billion lost in hollywood venture

       It was later that year that Sony paid $3.4 billion to buy 
     Columbia Pictures, a purchase driven largely by Mr. Morita, 
     who thought that if Sony had owned a studio issuing movies in 
     the Beta format, it would not have lost the VCR wars.
       Although Sony prided itself on being more Americanized than 
     its Japanese rivals, the purchase became a lightning rod for 
     American concern about a wave of Japanese acquisitions of 
     American companies and real estate. ``Japan Invades 
     Hollywood'' read the cover of Newsweek. In Japan as well, 
     Sony came in for criticism for stirring up anti-Japanese 
     feeling in the United States.
       Mr. Morita had a simple answer. ``If you don't want Japan 
     to buy it, don't sell it,'' he told New York Times reporter 
     shortly after the purchase. Nevertheless, sensitive to 
     concerns, he promised that the studio would be run by 
     Americans and would be free even to make a movie critical of 
     Japan's emperor. Worse than misjudging the political 
     reaction, however, the seemingly sophisticated Sony proved 
     to be a babe in the woods in Hollywood.
       Sony is generally considered to have overpaid for the 
     studio, and it paid several hundred million dollars more to 
     hire managers away from Warner Brothers--provoking a costly 
     fight with that studio. Those managers, in turn, spent money 
     extravagantly and produced a sting of box office bombs. Mr. 
     Morita and his successor as Sony chief executive, Norio Ohga, 
     perhaps because they were worried about stirring up anti-
     Japanese sentiment, exercised little oversight.
       In late 1994, in one of the most embarrassing moments in 
     its history, Sony announced that it would suffer a loss of 
     $3.2 billion from its investment in Hollywood. But it has 
     stuck with the studio, now called Sony Pictures 
     Entertainment, and appears to be turning it around.
       The Morita name will live on at Sony because many members 
     of Mr. Morita's family are involved in the company.
       Besides his wife, Mr. Morita is survived by his wife, 
     Yoshiko; his eldest son, Hideo, who now runs the sake brewery 
     and other family businesses; a younger son, Masao, an 
     executive with Sony Music Entertainment in Japan; and a 
     daughter, Naoko Okada, who also lives in Japan. He is also 
     survived by his brother Kazuaki, who volunteered to take over 
     the family sake brewery in Mr. Morita's stead; another 
     brother, Masaaki, a long-time Sony executive, and a sister, 
     Kikuko Iwama, who was married to the late Kazuo Iwama, a 
     former president of Sony.


                a longtime outsider is embraced at last

       In the 1990's, corporate Japan, worried about escalating 
     trade tensions, turned to Mr. Morita, whom it once considered 
     an arrogant maverick, to be its official leader. Mr. Morita 
     was slated to become chairman of Keidanren, Japan's most 
     powerful business lobbying organization, a post that had 
     always gone to the head of a company in an old-line heavy 
     industry like steel.
       But on Nov. 30, 1993, while playing his usual 7 A.M. 
     Tuesday tennis game, Mr. Morita suffered a cerebral 
     hemorrhage. A year later, just days after Sony announced its 
     huge Hollywood loss, Mr. Morita, in a wheelchair, attended a 
     Sony board meeting in Tokyo and resigned as chairman.
       He had spent much of his time since then undergoing 
     rehabilitation at his beachfront

[[Page S15152]]

     home near Diamond Head on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. At 
     first, Mr. Morita was able to speak a little, shake hands and 
     hit back tennis balls spit out by a machine, according to Mr. 
     Wada, the retired Sony government relations manager.
       But more recently, Mr. Wada said, Mr. Morita had lost the 
     ability to speak and communicated mainly through eye contact 
     with his wife. The couple's Christmas greeting card last year 
     had a message from Mrs. Morita saying her husband rose at 6 
     A.M., retired at 9 P.M. and spent much of the day in 
     rehabilitation. ``He may be overeating,'' she said, 
     mentioning his fondness for eel.
       Until he was taken to the hospital in Tokyo in August, Mr. 
     Morita had not returned to Japan for more than two years 
     because of concerns that flying would further damage his 
     health. He did not attend the 1997 funeral of Mr. Ibuka.
       But Sony officials still visited him in Hawaii to keep him 
     up to date on the business and show him new products. In 
     January 1998, some 200 executives, friends and dignitaries 
     came to Hawaii to attend a party for Mr. Morita's 77th 
     birthday, considered a lucky age in Japan.

                          ____________________