Whatever a great man does, that other men also do (imitate); whatever he sets up as the standard, that the world (people) follows.
- Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 3, Verse 21
I also wanted to see what the world was like and where our new company would fit in, so I planned to visit Europe after my New York business was concluded. I was excited when I climbed aboard the Statocruiser at Tokyo's Haneda Airport, a small suitcase in one hand and a bag slung over my shoulder.
I must admit now that I was initially discouraged by the very scale of the United States. Everything was so big, the distances were so great, the open spaces so vast, the regions so different. I thought it would be impossible to sell our products here. The place just overwhelmed me. The economy was booming, and the country seemed to have everything.
...
I flew to Europe, where I visited many companies and factories and began to feel a little better about the future of our company and of Japan. I visited Volkswagen, Mercedes, and Siemens, and many smaller companies, some of which have disappeared in the years since then. And of course in the electronics field I wanted to visit Philips in Holland, an electronics company that was famous worldwide. It was my visit to Philips that gave me courage and a new insight.
I was a bit depressed when I left Germany. Conditions were improving very rapidly there despite the devastation Germany had also suffered in the war, and it made Japan's postwar progress seem slow. One day I ordered some ice cream in a restaurant in Koenigstrasse in Düsseldorf, and the waiter served it with a miniature parasol stuck into it as a decoration. "This is from your country," he said, smiling and, I suppose, meaning it as a compliment. That was the extent of his knowledge of Japan and its capabilities, I thought, and maybe he was typical. What a long way we had to go.
I took the train from Düsseldorf to Eindhoven, and when I crossed the border from Germany to Holland I found a great difference. Germany, even so soon after the war, was becoming highly mechanized - Volkswagen was already producing seven hundred cars a day - and everybody seemed to be rebuilding and producing goods and new products very rapidly. But in Holland many people were riding bicycles. This was a purely agricultural country and a small one at that. You could see old-fashioned windmills everywhere, just as in old Dutch landscape paintings. Everything seemed so quaint. When I finally arrived in Eindhoven, I was surprised to see what a huge company Philips was, although I knew Philips was very successful with their electrical products in Southeast Asia and around the world. I don't know what I expected, but it was a surprise to find the great N. V. Philips enterprise of my imagination situated in a small town in a small corner of a small agricultural country.
I stared at the statue of Dr. Philips in front of the train station, and I thought of our own village of Kosugaya and the similar bronze statue of my father's great-grandfather that once stood there. I wandered around the town thinking about Dr. Philips, and when I visited the factory I was all the more taken with the thought that a man born in such a small, out-of-the-way place in an agricultural country could build such a huge, highly technical company with a fine worldwide reputation. Maybe, I thought, we could do the same thing in Japan. It was quite a dream, but I remember writing Ibuka a letter from Holland saying, "If Philips can do it, maybe we can, too." I spoke very little English in those days, and I just visited these factories as a tourist. I took no VIP tour, and I met none of the executives of the companies. I represented an unknown company then, but in the next four decades Sony and Philips, two companies from small and seemingly isolated places, cooperated in design standards and in joint development that has led me to many technological advances, from the standard compact audio cassette to the newest watershed development in home sound reproduction, the compact disc (digital audio disc), where we combined our strength in pulse code modulation research with Philips' fine laser technology. There are still other joint developments in the R&D stage.
- Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony
