Pacific: The Ocean of the Future. Simon Winchester

that gap—to employ and revere both titanium and bamboo, the die-straight and the gently curved—says much about the Pacific Ocean more generally.

      For the Pacific had become some kind of cultural meeting place, for a certain kind of marriage—whether permanent or temporary, it was then too early to say, and with details and conclusions to be teased out. It would be a marriage of, on the one hand, a congeries of ancient natural cultures, most of them animist in origin, that permeate and define those countries that make up what the West likes to call the East; and on the other, the more numerically based, more ruthlessly practical capitalist and Judeo-Christian cultures that tend to dominate America, the American West, and what indeed Western peoples more roundly like to call the West.

      As far as Sony was concerned, the company seemed first to enjoy and exult in its success, but then later to pay and suffer the often inevitable price of the pioneer. It first rose in public esteem on what seemed an impossibly steep trajectory. It soared with seeming effortlessness through the twentieth century. Its founders died and were honored and memorialized. Akio Morita is widely remembered; Masaru Ibuka, the true creator, rather less so. Then the company began to stutter, to lose velocity and altitude; and it commenced, in the first years of the new century, a long and painfully public decline, with assets sold, management changed, unwise ventures attempted. There came an all-too-regular litany of apologies, meetings dominated by the deep bowing of abject sorrow offered in silence by sad and dignified men who felt they had let everyone down. No excuses, though. No blame attached to others. Just acceptance and endurance, as is the Japanese way.

      Sony was hardly alone in its sufferings. The consumer electronics business turned out to be a field of extraordinary competitive brutality. The Japanese companies—Sony, of course, but also Matsushita, Sanyo, Sharp, Toshiba, Panasonic, and a host of others—had at first vanquished the Americans. Their impeccable Japanese-made products and adroit marketing campaigns had reduced firms such as RCA, Magnavox, Zenith, and Sylvania to quivering wrecks, and eventually made them curl up, wither, and perish. The Japanese then assumed lead position and, from the western Pacific, commanded the heights of this new world order.