Pacific: The Ocean of the Future. Simon Winchester

cleverly approached NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster, and offered it equipment that would allow it to present a thirty-minute radio broadcast in this newfangled stereophonic manner. On December 4, 1952, NHK introduced its stereo experiment, “produced” as the continuity announcer solemnly intoned, “by Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation and NHK.” It was a stunning success. Thousands heard it and responded with unalloyed enthusiasm. “Our cat, who had been sleeping on the foot-warming table,” wrote one listener, “was shocked by the sound-effects and jumped out of the room.” The reports were telegraphed to America, and back to a clearly elated Ibuka.

      By chance he was now coming toward the end of his expedition. He was staying at the Taft Hotel in New York—and on a night now famous in company lore, was being kept relentlessly awake by loud music from the Roxy Theatre nearby. Lying sleepless in his hotel bed, he suddenly connected two ideas that were floating through his mind.

      First, Western Electric, parent company of Bell Labs, the inventor of the transistor, had just announced that it was looking to license outside companies to produce transistors in bulk. Second, Ibuka knew he had more than forty newly hired scientists of exceptional brainpower still tweaking the finer points of the company’s tape recorders, but with not a great deal else to occupy their minds. So, without asking for anyone’s agreement back home, he spent his final hours in America applying for the necessary production license—characteristically dismissing the idea that anyone at company HQ might balk at the twenty-five-thousand-dollar fee being demanded for it.

      He must have pondered the matter more deeply as his Northwest Airlines DC-6 thundered westward toward and then across the Pacific, and whenever he got out to stretch his legs in the increasing chill of the airports at Minneapolis and Edmonton, Anchorage and Shemya, a lonely and gale-swept U.S. Air Force outpost in the Aleutian Islands. When finally he arrived back at Haneda Airport two days later, he was convinced: “Radios,” he declared to the assembled senior staff. “We are going to make this transistor. And we are going to use it to make radios—radios that are small enough so that each individual will be able to carry one around for his own use, with a power that will enable civilization to reach even those areas that have no electric power yet.”

      A stunned silence greeted his announcement. “Too wild, too risky” was how one of the company managers summed up their reactions. Maybe the established, big-time companies (Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Hitachi) could make them. They already had licensed agreements with Bell to make their own transistors, and they had the resources to do so. But not tiny Totsuko, the new kid on the block.

      There were financial and bureaucratic problems—getting twenty-five thousand dollars out of the company coffers was trying enough; getting these dollars wired out of currency-starved Japan was at first well-nigh impossible. There were also technical problems, which Ibuka solved through determination and prescience, but also with the help of the figure who would become the third member of the triumvirate of titans of this story, a brilliant young geophysicist and volcanologist named Kazuo Iwama. He came from the government’s main seismological observatory, and like everyone else at Totsuko, he knew next to nothing about semiconductors.

      But Iwama proved to be a phenomenally quick study. He and Ibuka flew back to America in the summer of 1954, to learn more about transistor technology, the revenue from tape recorder sales covering their hotel bills and food. The Sony Archives today hold the fruits of that three-month visit: four fat file folders crammed with hundreds upon hundreds of blue one-page onionskin paper air mail letters that Kazuo Iwama sent back, often several at a time, every single day.

      The letters are crammed with detail, tissue-thin Rosetta stones of jumbled numbers, arcane formulas, Chinese ideographs, Japanese phonetic scripts, and a scattering of English words and phrases, together with fine filigree drawings of crucibles and diagrams of oscillators and depictions of circuitry that give the letters the appearance of some strange new art form, the designs for the future of an exotic new world. “Zone leveling single crystal,” one letter reads. “Pure paraffin wax,” another. “Detexile paper—no sulfur.” The assembled papers constitute a small encyclopedia of transistor wisdom, a distillate of all that was then known in America about this magical new device. And in 1954, all of it headed westward to Japan, there to help create an economic, eventually transpacific revolution.

      There were other challenges. Even in the early 1950s, the Japanese still felt something of a sense of cultural cringe, a pervasive lack of self-confidence. Years of hard work and dedication had improved the appearance of most Japanese cities, but the shame and humiliation of the war still exerted a powerful drag on progress. Morita recalls being in Germany—noting how rapidly it had rebuilt its own ruined cities—and having a shopkeeper in Düsseldorf offer him an ice cream with a miniature paper parasol stuck in it, remarking kindly that it came from his country. Is this all we are good for? he asked himself. Is this what the world thinks of us?

      Yet it was rather more complicated than this. I am sure I am not alone in believing that many East Asian sciences, in particular, have long suffered, have long been held back, by the basic Asian concept of “face,” of what the Japanese term mentsu. This (which, very broadly, relates to the giving of respect and the protection of one’s own dignity and regard) plays a profoundly important role in the social exchanges of many countries in the northwestern Pacific. The socially lethal consequences of losing face or, more dangerously, of causing others to lose it, may well have inhibited certain kinds of scientific progress, in large part because such consequences militate against experimentation, which invariably embraces failure, even public failure. Picking oneself up and beginning again, making the experiment subtly different, and performing many experiments until finally one works—such is the essence of scientific advance. And this was not always an easy concept for Asian scientists to accept.

      This is not to say that failure plays no part in Japanese society—far from it, indeed. To watch a sushi chef, for example, compelling his apprentice to cook tamago (the egg-and-vinegar-and-soy-sauce omelet that is a key component of a full-blown nigiri dinner) is to watch the pursuit of perfection through the repetition of countless attempts, most of which initially fail. Time and again the youngster falls short of making satisfactory tamago, and each time, the master contemptuously throws it away. Yet no shame is attached to the apprentice’s failures, even though they seem to happen day after day and day. For, eventually, one hopes, the boy succeeds in this crucial task, is ultimately inducted into the corps of the minimally accomplished, and then slowly, painstakingly, makes his way toward becoming an acceptable sushi chef. Failure is just part of the process—in this and many other callings in Japanese life.

      But science is very different from sushi making. Japanese cuisine is a time-honored craft, with teachers (sensei) who will cajole and berate an apprentice along the hard road to success. A scientist, on the other hand, has to engage alone, in a quest for the undiscovered and the unknown. He has to trust himself to do so without a sensei at his elbow, with only his own curiosity to compel him. This would be a formidably difficult challenge for any scientist. For one who might be further burdened by the concept of “face,” by the abhorrence of public failure, even more so.

      The great empiricists, from Bacon and Galileo through to Watson and Crick, all failed, but a mark of their greatness was that they never abandoned their quest for scientific truth. The same cannot easily be said of those early East Asian scientists, particularly those who worked during the years of the Enlightenment in the West. Such advances as were made in Europe of the time were simply not happening in the East, no matter the centuries of progress (most especially Chinese progress) in the years before. Puzzlement over just why this was has generated interminable debate over the years. The so-called Needham Question3—why, after so much earlier progress, was there so little advance in China after the fifteenth century?—distills this, and has never been satisfactorily answered. Face is suggested as a component, one among many.

      It was clearly a component in those early Totsuko days. One member of the research team working on the licensed transistors remarked that “the voice of Bell Labs is like the voice of God”—implying that for his Japanese colleagues to try to do anything different from the way the Americans were doing things back in Murray Hill would be to court failure, disaster, and the