**Who Built Sony? The Underdog Tale of Rice Cookers, Radios, and a Dream to Make Japan Cool**
(Who Made Sony)
Picture Tokyo in 1946. The city is rubble. World War II just ended. Jobs are scarce. Hope is thinner. In a small, fire-bombed department store, two men with big ideas meet. One is an engineer who loves gadgets. The other is a physics teacher with a knack for sales. Their names? Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita. Together, they start a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo. You’ve never heard of it. But you *definitely* know its new name: Sony.
Ibuka and Morita didn’t set out to build a tech empire. They just wanted to fix stuff. Their first product? A rice cooker. Sort of. It burned rice. A lot. But failure didn’t stop them. They pivoted. Fast. By 1950, they built Japan’s first tape recorder. It weighed as much as a suitcase. Nobody bought it. Stores said it was too expensive. Morita didn’t give up. He lugged the recorder to schools, courts, even prisons. He showed people how it could replay voices. Slowly, orders trickled in.
The real breakthrough came when they asked: *What if we make things smaller?* In 1955, they launched a pocket-sized radio. Japan loved it. America noticed. But their company name was a mouthful. So in 1958, they rebranded. “Sony” was born—a mix of “sonus” (Latin for sound) and “sonny” (slang for a young boy). It was short. Snappy. Easy to spell. Perfect for global ambitions.
Sony didn’t just sell gadgets. It sold cool. In the 1960s, America thought “Made in Japan” meant cheap knockoffs. Sony flipped that. Their Trinitron TV? Crisp color. Sleek design. No bulky box. The Sony Walkman in 1979? A revolution. Suddenly, music wasn’t stuck at home. You could take it jogging. On buses. Everywhere. Critics called it antisocial. Teens called it freedom.
But Sony’s path wasn’t smooth. When Morita tried selling TVs in the U.S., stores said, “Americans want big screens, not tiny ones.” He disagreed. He stacked Sony TVs in fancy hotels and bars. People saw them. Wanted them. Soon, Sony stores popped up worldwide. Morita even moved to New York, learning English by watching *Gunsmoke*. He schmoozed CEOs, hosted parties, and made Sony feel less foreign.
Then came the Betamax. In the 1980s, Sony’s video recorder lost to VHS. Why? VHS tapes held more movies. Sony refused to license Betamax tech. Rivals teamed up. Sony lost the war but kept fighting. They poured cash into R&D. Compact Discs. PlayStations. Even robots. Some ideas flopped (looking at you, Betamax). Others changed culture.
Behind the gadgets was a philosophy: *Innovate or die*. Ibuka and Morita hated copying. They hired weirdos and dreamers. Their office had no dress code. Engineers napped under desks. Mistakes were okay. Quitting wasn’t. When Sony engineers said a portable music player was impossible, Morita handed them a block of wood. “Make it this size.” They did.
(Who Made Sony)
Today, Sony makes cameras, movies, even Spider-Man. But it started with two guys in a broken building, fixing radios and burning rice. They believed Japan could be more than war scars. They believed small things could shake the world. Every time you snap a photo, play a game, or stream a song, you’re holding a piece of that dream.
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