Kon BambooSchoot

Emperor Hirohito
Japan's wartime monarch outlived his role as god-king, but he oversaw the nation's modern transformation
Born April 29, 1901 in Tokyo
1926 Succeeds Emperor Yoshihito to Chrysanthemum throne
1931 Japanese troops invade Manchuria
1940 Japan joins Axis alliance
1945 Approves Japan's surrender, ending World War II
1946 Approves American-made constitution permitting occupation by U.S. Publicly repudiates divinity of the Emperor
1989 Dies Jan. 7 at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo
By traditional (and official) count, he was Japan's 124th emperor, but Hirohito ranks first in length of tenure. His reign spanned the years between 1921, when he became regent for his ailing father, and his death in 1989--a record of regal endurance comparable to those of Austria-Hungary's Franz Josef and Britain's Victoria. At his formal accession to the Chrysanthemum Throne in 1926, he took the official name of Showa--which translates as "Enlightened Peace." Ironically, his era was characterized by the brutal military invasion of China, followed by his country's most disastrous war, then its unprecedented foreign occupation and, ultimately, Japan's transformation into the world's second economic super-power.
In an odd way his presence and personality became the one persistent unifying factor for his countrymen in a century of sharp and unexpected transformation. The metamorphosis of his imperial image from the plumed militarist on horseback to the democratic monarch waving to crowds with his crushed fedora remains one of history's most puzzling, leaving basic questions about his ability and his legacy still unanswered a decade after his death.

Beyond doubt, Hirohito was the 20th century's great survivor. History has not given too many the chance to lead a nation into appalling disaster, only to emerge with at least partial credit for its reform and rebirth. Critics and loyal supporters alike have cited instances of Hirohito's superior decision-making or shrewd behind-the-scenes policy-setting. Others have likened him to the character portrayed by Peter Sellers in the film Being There, a modest mediocrity whose commonplace observances were given the value of Delphic instruction. Both versions are correct in the context of Hirohito's society--the Japanese have never shown much respect for Aristotle's law of contradictions. To understand the Showa Emperor's goals and premises, we must examine his life, as he led it and as it was led for him by his multitudinous helpers.

Born on April 29, 1901, the eldest son of the Emperor Yoshihito, he was enrolled at the age of seven in the Peers' School. Its principal was the redoubtable Maresuke Nogi, the victorious infantry general of the Russo-Japanese war and an embodiment of the old samurai virtues. From Nogi and two Confucian tutors, Hirohito was given a heavy dose of stern dynastic duty, as the semi-divine descendant of the legendary Sun goddess Amaterasu. He lived with ancient ritual, as his ancestors had done before him. By tradition the pontiffs of Japan's shadowy Shinto religion, emperors were revered as semi-sacred beings. But they were secluded in their Kyoto palaces and generally kept powerless by varieties of military leaders, ruling in the imperial name.

In 1868, however, just 33 years before Hirohito's birth, the ancient role of the emperor was redefined. His grandfather Mutsuhito, known to history as the Emperor Meiji, had been brought out of seclusion by the young samurai modernizers of the Restoration that bears his name. Shedding his 10th century ritual robes for 19th century military uniforms, he was installed with his court in a refurbished palace in the new capital of Tokyo. Having swept aside the 250-year rule of the Tokugawa shoguns, the reformers needed an active symbol at the head of their nation-state. Meiji became the country's first constitutional monarch.

Yet he was a monarch with a difference. Impressed by the socially unifying force of Christianity in Europe's nation-states, the ever-practical Meiji reformers revived the pontifical role of the Emperor and made Shinto the official state religion. Going further, they decided that Japan's modernized conscript army and navy would report to the Emperor alone. Meiji took his new military role seriously. So did his leading general. In 1912, on the day of Meiji's funeral, Nogi and his wife committed the ceremonial suicide of junshi, the samurai ritual of "following one's lord in death."

A few days earlier, Nogi had paid a last visit to Hirohito and his brothers, admonishing them to live dedicated, frugal lives, as he had taught them. Hirohito, then 11, would heed Nogi's advice. For the rest of his boyhood the lessons continued, under the venerable Admiral Heihachiro Togo and a succession of teachers and advisers. They schooled him in constitutional kingship, as well as Confucius and the ancient Japanese chronicles.

In 1921 the young Crown Prince took a trip overseas, the first ever for a top member of the Japanese royal family. A shy, serious and reflective young man--he had already begun to collect specimens for his lifelong study of marine biology--he was bowled over by his cordial reception in Europe, especially by the relatively relaxed ways of the British royal family. He visited museums, played golf, went fishing in the Scottish highlands and even managed a day's shopping in Paris. For all the retainers following him, he felt oddly at ease. He wrote his brother Chichibu, "I discovered freedom for the first time in England."

It didn't last. Back in Tokyo, he was now regent for his sickly father, the Taisho Emperor. (Known principally for his fondness for smart uniforms, a Kaiser Wilhelm-type moustache and a failing mind, the old man was finally removed from public view after whiling away a formal session of the Diet by rolling up the manuscript of his speech and peering through it at his distinguished audience.) Soon after the disastrous 1923 Kanto earthquake, an assassin took a shot at Hirohito as he rode in the imperial limousine--and only narrowly missed. At this, the always conservative palace guard closed in. He was able to marry Nagako, an imperial princess, in 1924 despite some advisers' disapproval. (It was said there was color-blindness in her family!) But by the time he succeeded to the throne, after his father's death in 1926, he was surrounded by protective protocol. As the historian Daikichi Irokawa put it, "The prince was forced into the life of a caged bird."

Twice he attempted to assert his authority, with some success. In 1928 aggressive army units, already pushing into Manchuria, contrived the assassination of the Chinese warlord Zhang Zuolin. When Prime Minister Giichi Tanaka did not take action against the plotters, Hirohito forced his resignation. The second time was more serious. In 1936, with militarist sentiment rising, a group of young officers called out two regiments in an attempted coup d'état, killing several civilian officials. Hirohito was incensed, especially since the militarists said they were acting "in the Emperor's name." He ordered his generals to suppress the rebellion. With some reluctance--since most of them were by no means opposed to military rule--they subdued the rebels and executed 19 of the ringleaders, under a direct order from their imperial Commander-in-Chief. It was the first such order in modern Japanese history. Also the last.

The following year Japanese armed forces moved into China. Its path scarred by unspeakable brutalities, "the Emperor's Army" perpetrated a series of atrocities, of which the ghastly Nanjing Massacre was only one incident. Cabinet after cabinet, civilian governments supinely backed the aggression, which led directly to the Pacific War. Big business, happy at the prospect of new resources and markets on the Asian mainland, by and large supported the Army. So did most of the population, as the reports of victories came rolling in.

Why did the Emperor not stop it? In a series of documents published after his death, including direct transcripts of Hirohito's monologues and interviews, the pros and cons of his behavior have been argued out. Apologists--Hirohito included--contended that, with militarists directing the government from the late 1930s on, any attempt at imperial restraint would have resulted in another coup, this time successful. Japanese history abounds in incidents where emperors were sidetracked or deposed by political regimes. And Hirohito, given his intensive indoctrination and ever-cautious advisers, was anxious to preserve the dynasty. That, and not averting a wider war, was his main objective.

There is no doubt that Hirohito the man wanted peace. There is equally no doubt that this shy, reclusive family man, who could be goaded to act decisively only in extremis, lacked the courage to enforce his wishes. So Hirohito the Emperor went to war. Like his grandfather Meiji, he not only reviewed the parades but participated in the strategy sessions. Cautious as ever, he criticized Japan's decision to join the Axis powers and commented tartly on the army's bogging down in China. He urged that talks with the United States continue in 1941, even after the U.S. embargo on oil and other raw materials made compromise difficult. He interrupted the conference that decided to wage war with the U.S. by reciting a poem that his grandfather Meiji had once written in similar circumstances: Though I consider the surrounding seas as my brothers Why is it that the waves should rise so high?

Like his other oblique calls for restraint, this was politely ignored. It was hardly an imperial order. With the first victories of Pearl Harbor, Singapore and the Philippines, Hirohito was swept along with the tide of national euphoria. Three years later, however, defeat was staring Japan in the face. In January 1945, Prince Konoe, a former Prime Minister (and grandfather of early-1990s Prime Minister Hosokawa) appealed to the Emperor to put an end to the war. He refused. And here Hirohito's responsibility for the conflict deepened. If he didn't start the war, he continued it. For almost a year, in the face of gathering defeat, he urged his generals and admirals to gain one last victory in order to secure decent peace terms. During that period an additional 1.5 million Japanese were killed.

The fateful imperial staff conference in August came only after the atomic bombs, the fearful fire-bombings, the strangling submarine blockade and the Soviet Union's entry into the war. At last, the Emperor cast a deciding vote for surrender and later made his memorable broadcast to Japan's people about "enduring the unendurable." It was the first unequivocal decision he had made since 1936.

Just a month later the semi-divine Emperor, in striped trousers and a morning coat, reluctantly handed his top hat to an aide and entered General Douglas MacArthur's reception room at the refurbished American Embassy to begin what amounted to his re-incarnation. Accepting responsibility for the war, he offered to abdicate or do whatever else was necessary. But MacArthur wanted him to stay. In the first of 11 meetings between the Emperor and the new American Shogun, the two men worked out an odd but intense collaboration. The U.S. general flatly resisted colleagues who felt that Hirohito should be tried as a war criminal. Above all he wanted a peaceful occupation. The Emperor who finally stopped his generals from continuing a last-ditch war was surely the man who could keep his subjects peaceful. The Emperor agreed.

The decision remains debatable. With 20-20 hindsight, modern critics have pointed out that Hirohito bore almost as much responsibility for the war as Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, who was sentenced to death by the war crimes tribunal. More than 3 million Japanese--military and civilians--had died in a war waged in the Emperor's name. To exonerate him completely cast doubt on the entire proceedings and has done much over the years to deepen Japan's collective amnesia about the crimes of its military. At the time, however, the decision seemed prudent to the American occupiers (myself among them), faced with the task of governing, indeed re-modeling millions of Japanese who had only recently seemed ready to fight to the death against invasion.

So the Emperor set to work to assist America's effort at de-mo-ku-ra-shi for Japan. On Jan. 1, 1946, he publicly denounced " ...the false conceptions that the Emperor is divine." He supported MacArthur's new made-in-America constitution with its renunciation of war. Later that year, with MacArthur's vocal support, Hirohito drove out of the palace in his ancient Rolls-Royce and went to the people. For five years a tightly secluded ruler whose very photographs had been held sacrosanct traveled from one end of Japan to the other, talking to his countrymen and pressing the flesh (although he generally preferred exchanging bows) in the manner of a late 20th century constitutional monarch. In the process, shyness and guilt gave way to P.R. sense and confidence.

As TIME's Tokyo correspondent, I followed him on some of those tours--and was impressed. As I wrote in 1950: "The crumpled gray hat became in time the badge of a successful political campaigner. The monosyllables in which Hirohito had conducted his early interviews with the common folk grew into coherent questions and intelligent replies. The shy man waved his hat in the air to acknowledge greetings. He smiled. Slowly the sense of a personality behind the walled moat of the Imperial Palace communicated itself to the people of Japan."

For all the hurt he had permitted--and there are many Japanese who can never forgive him--the imperial reinvention was by and large successful. The same day I wrote my report, I talked to some steel workers at the Yahata mill in Kyushu after Hirohito's visit. "I must admit," one of them told me, "that we were all filled with deep emotion. When you talk about the Emperor, it's just an abstract thing. But when you see him close at hand, it's different, somehow... The Emperor is our father. He should be left just as he is."

When the Occupation ended, Hirohito continued to act as the "symbolic emperor" he had promised to become. His daily activities were publicized for a generally respectful nation. The 1959 wedding of his son Akihito to a commoner, Michiko Shoda--they met playing tennis--was as popular as any royal wedding could be. The imperial survivor presided over the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 and made greatly successful foreign trips to the U.S. in 1975 and Europe in 1971, spending the night at Buckingham Palace just 50 years after his first British visit. While a few rightwing fanatics still preached the old rote reverence--the mayor of Nagasaki was almost killed in 1990 for mentioning Hirohito's war guilt--the country at large viewed Hirohito as a still useful piece of human furniture, preferably left in the drawing room.

He died on Jan. 7, 1989, after months of a wasting illness, each operation or injection reported in the same minute, vein-by-vein detail that Japan's media lavishes on baseball averages, weather reports or trade statistics. His death did not have the stuff of grandeur, like that of his grandfather Meiji, whose funereal cannonades moved the great novelist Soseki Natsume to announce the end of his era. There was no General Nogi to commit ritual suicide--conspicuously not in a country whose modest Self-Defense Forces enjoy one of the biggest drop-out rates among the world's military.

But for almost all Japanese who watched the incessant TV commentary, there came a moment of wistful stock-taking. For better or worse, the Showa Emperor's life had limned the world in which they lived. They had forgotten the bad beginnings of the era. The good life that came later they would try their best to perpetuate.

Frank Gibney Sr. is author of Japan: The Fragile Superpower and president of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College
Eiji Toyoda
Born Sept. 12, 1913 near Nagoya
1933 His cousin Kiichiro founds company later renamed Toyota Motor Corp.
1955 Produces first model, the Crown, but U.S. sales are low
1966 New model, the Corolla, is a success
1967 Named Toyota president
1973 Oil crisis boosts sales of Toyota's fuel-efficient models
1994 Steps down from Toyota board

People around the world drive Toyotas--and produce them too. A textile-factory boy is the industrial wizard who made it happen
By ED REINGOLD

Eiji Toyoda smiles as he recalls the early days: "When I went to Detroit in 1950, we were producing 40 cars a day. Ford was making 8,000 units, a 200-times difference. The gap was enormous." But not all that daunting to a young Japanese engineer.


m o r e
Asia's Century on Wheels
America may be the land of the automobile, but Asia too has gotten behind the wheel in the past 50 years

Today the cherubic octogenarian, his company's retired and revered elder, contemplates a global firm that makes cars in 24 countries and sells $90 billion worth of them in 160 countries. Moreover, the way the company makes cars has turned the world's automotive industry on its ear. Toyota Motor Corp. (the family name was slightly amended for use as a corporate moniker) is the most efficient carmaker in the world. Getting there has had a lot to do with the talents of a remarkable man and a family with resourcefulness in its genes.

Eiji Toyoda says he grew up, literally, inside his father's textile mill in western Japan, near Nagoya. "So from childhood," he recalled in his 1987 memoir Fifty Years in Motion, "machines and business were always there right in front of me. I probably developed an understanding of both." The textile business was built on the ingenuity of Eiji's uncle Rashomon Sakichi Toyoda, an impatient, chain-smoking carpenter and inventor. Sakichi used his woodworking skills to build textile looms, perfecting a model in 1898 that automatically stopped if a thread broke, thus freeing an operator to oversee several looms at once.

When the British textile machinery maker Platt Bros. in 1929 paid Toyoda £100,000 for the rights to Sakichi's latest loom, he earmarked it for a venture that would make automobiles. Ford and General Motors were already assembling passenger cars in Osaka and Yokohama, and Sakichi challenged his eldest son Kiichiro--Eiji's cousin--to "build a Japanese car with Japanese hands." Sakichi did not live to see it happen, but before he died he made sure his favorite nephew Eiji, 18 years younger than Kiichiro, went off to university to study engineering.

Kiichiro set up the automotive department at Toyoda Automatic Loom Works in 1933, as Eiji was entering Tokyo Imperial University. Within a year the first engine was built, a Chevrolet copy so exact it could accept genuine Chevy parts. By the time Eiji received his mechanical engineering degree in 1936, Kiichiro was developing the system now known as lean manufacturing. He reasoned that the company could save money if parts and components could be delivered to the assembly line just in time to be installed on the car being built. He also changed the traditional physical layout of the plant so that machine tools were grouped along the flow of production. That made the supply line shorter and meant parts could get into the assembly process sooner. He then began convincing suppliers to cooperate in his just-in-time system. Eiji's first assignment was to run the company lab in Tokyo, and he set about lining up mechanical and scientific specialists to join Toyota. Then he worked on the shop floor in charge of machinery and production planning.

The first Toyota passenger car, styled after the Chrysler models of the day, went into production in 1936. But the Japanese government decreed that trucks were needed for Japan's military adventure in China, so Toyota's passenger car was shelved. By the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, the company was building 1,000 trucks a month. As the tide of war in the Pacific turned against Japan, however, overseas supply lines were cut and production at Toyota dwindled. Materials and parts were so short that the army ordered trucks with a single headlight and only rear-wheel brakes. On Aug. 14, 1945, the day before the war ended, American bombers destroyed a quarter of Toyota's new plant at Koromo, now called Toyota City. Eiji remembers the chill he felt when, after the war, he was shown U.S. plans for a full-scale bombing raid on Toyota scheduled for a week later.

From the ruins, Kiichiro began to rebuild the company. But expecting that vehicle production would be forbidden by U.S. Occupation forces, he assigned Eiji to set up a chinaware business and sent his son Shoichiro to northern Japan to learn how to produce fish paste. But the Occupation authorities called on Toyota to build trucks and buses for an immobilized postwar population. The china and fish paste projects were abandoned, and truck orders came pouring in. Unfortunately, payments did not. Deflationary measures put into place to curb Japan's soaring prices shoved Toyota to the brink of bankruptcy.

One way to ease Toyota's financial crunch was a workforce reduction, but the news that 1,600 jobs would be cut inflamed Toyota workers. Eiji remembers facing an angry crowd of several thousand, explaining that the company was in danger of sinking. Local banks also moved to save the firm. The bankers didn't want Toyota to make products it couldn't sell and get paid for. Eiji devised a plan for a new company, Toyota Motor Sales, to send orders directly to the manufacturing company, deliver the vehicles and collect payment. (The sales arm operated independently until 1981, when Eiji reintegrated both companies to form Toyota Motor Corp.)

Eiji's 1950 visit to the U.S. opened his eyes to the potential of large-volume production--and eventual export to the U.S. He told colleagues he didn't see anything in the U.S. that seemed beyond Toyota's capability. Returning to Japan, he and the company's production genius, Taiichi Ohno, focused on making many cars in small batches more efficiently than the big companies could. Small supplies of parts are brought to the production line frequently, rather than having a large stockpile by the line or in a warehouse, which is now considered wasteful.

They established the kanban system, in which parts and supplies are ordered as they are being used. Every Toyota worker became an inspector, and each was given the power to stop the production line if a defect was found, an echo of Sakichi's first automatic looms. Suppliers were encouraged to use that system. Eiji realized that correcting defects when they were discovered rather than copying Western methods of repairing them later would be more efficient in the long run.

On New Year's Day 1955, Eiji put on his tuxedo and drove Toyota's first full-scale production model, the Crown, off the assembly line. The car was popular in transportation-starved Japan, and with an excess of enthusiasm he introduced it into the U.S. market in 1957. It was a flop, incapable of sustained freeway speeds and prone to overheating. Eiji eventually flew to the U.S. to tell his sales force to stand down temporarily.

Confidence was restored in the early 1960s with the diminutive Corona and its even smaller successor the Corolla, introduced in 1966, which became one of the world's most ubiquitous cars. Eiji's further ambition was to produce a luxury car to rival Mercedes and BMW. The Lexus debuted in 1989 and immediately stole market share from established luxury models. This year, Toyota aims to sell a total of 1.5 million cars a year in the North American market, more than 60% of them made locally. The next big target is Europe, where Toyota already has a plant in Britain and will open one in France in 2001.

Eiji stayed at the Toyota helm for 15 years, through the stormy battles over emission controls and U.S. demands for export restraint, which he initially opposed. A partial solution to that problem, producing cars in the U.S., turned out to be one of his most visionary decisions. "We did not have an alternative," he says. "My first feeling was that [in Japan] we can produce and sell the cheapest cars in the world. But I guess that was not possible." His modesty was misplaced. Were Toyoda to return to Detroit today, 50 years after his eye-opening first visit, he would have another impressive sight to gaze upon at the U.S. Automotive Hall of Fame. In 1994 he became the second Japanese after Soichiro Honda to have his visage enshrined there, alongside Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler and the other giants of what had been, for much of the 20th century, a very American industry.

Ed Reingold reported on the automobile industry as chief of TIME's Tokyo and Detroit bureaus
Akio Morita
Born Jan. 26, 1921 in Nagoya
1946 Co-founds Sony with Masaru Ibuka
1960 Establishes Sony Corp. of America; a year later it becomes the first Japanese company to list its shares on Wall Street
1979 Sony introduces the Walkman
1989 Co-authors The Japan That Can Say No, denouncing countries such as the U.S. that complain about Japanese imports
1994 Resigns as chairman of Sony

From the rubble of postwar Japan, Sony's charismatic co-founder built his electronics firm into a trusted brand and a truly global company
By JOHN NATHAN

He was the scion of a prosperous merchant family that had been brewing sake and soy sauce in central Japan for more than 300 years. In the spring of 1946, released by his father from his obligation to take over the family business, Akio Morita co-founded Sony with an electrical engineer named Masaru Ibuka. For over 40 years, Ibuka and Morita ran Sony together from adjoining offices, reveling in each other's company. Ibuka's great gift was inspiring his engineers to overreach themselves. Morita, a brilliant marketer, transformed Sony into an international presence. In the process, he matured into an irresistibly charismatic advocate of Japan's business interests. By 1993, when he suffered a stroke that deprived him of speech and confined him to a wheelchair, he had become the best-known Japanese citizen in the world.

On his first trip to the United States in 1953, Morita was overwhelmed by the scale of things and by the power of a booming economy. Germany, the next stop on his tour, was no more reassuring. But when he visited Philips Electronics in Holland, he was surprised to discover that this great organization was headquartered in the old world town of Eindhoven. Here the scale and pace of life seemed manageable. "If Philips can do it," he wrote home to Ibuka, "perhaps we can also manage."

In 1955, returning to the U.S. with tape recorders and Sony's first transistor radios in hand, Morita made the rounds of distributors but found little enthusiasm. Finally a purchasing agent at the Bulova watch company saw the miniature radios and said he would take 100,000 of them, provided he could market them under the Bulova name. This was a huge order, worth more than Sony's total capitalization at the time. But Morita was set on building Sony into an international brand: despite a cable from Ibuka and the board instructing him to accept the order, he turned Bulova down. Later, he would describe this as the best business decision of his career.

The U.S. market had always glittered at the center of Morita's vision of a global Sony. The Sony Corporation of America, which he established in 1960 and fashioned with his own hands over the next 30 years, was perhaps his greatest masterpiece. Morita was determined to build a Sony presence in the U.S. that would dominate the landscape without appearing foreign, and he succeeded remarkably: in 1998, according to a Harris poll, Sony overtook General Motors and General Electric as the brand name best known and most highly esteemed among U.S. consumers.

In 1963, Morita moved himself and his family into a roomy apartment sublet from the violinist Nathan Milstein on Manhattan's Upper East Side and lived there for over a year. Morita reasoned that to sell to Americans effectively, he would have to know more about them and how they lived. Ibuka was reluctant to let him go: no Japanese organization had ever sent its No. 2 man to live abroad. Ibuka finally agreed when Morita promised to spend a week in Tokyo every two months.

If Morita's move to New York was unsettling to Sony, it was also a profound disruption in the lives of his wife Yoshiko, who spoke no English at the time, and their three young children. But in the family Morita's word was law: despite the Western aura he projected, he was a thoroughly traditional Japanese husband at home, stricter, if anything, than his own father.

No sooner were they installed on Fifth Avenue than the Moritas threw themselves into building a social life. By the mid-'60s, though Morita was once again commuting from Tokyo, they had established a place for themselves in New York society, and Morita was on his way to becoming the best-connected Japanese businessman in the U.S. The only Japanese on the international advisory boards of Pan American, IBM and Morgan Guaranty Trust, he developed lasting relationships with a broad spectrum of American business leaders, and he proved himself a master at leveraging his connections in ways that were beneficial to Sony. The profitable joint ventures Morita engineered throughout the '70s and '80s--CBS/Sony, Texas Instruments Japan, Sony-Prudential Life Insurance and others--were in every case facilitated by his personal connections to the American executives involved.

Morita's association was not limited to businessmen. Every U.S. ambassador to Japan during the '70s and '80s left the country with fond memories of evenings at the Moritas' home in Tokyo and an indefinable but certain sense of loyalty to Sony.

To the Americans and Europeans who knew him over time, in striking contrast to the "typical" Japanese businessmen they encountered in their professional lives, Morita did not seem at all reticent, uncomfortable, aloof, enigmatic or inscrutable. On the contrary, he was a dynamo of dazzling energy. A striking man, with silky hair that turned silver in his early 40s and that he parted down the middle in the manner of a Meiji dandy, he had slate-gray eyes, rare for a Japanese--giving rise to rumors that among his ancestors lurked a White Russian. His curiosity about people seemed boundless, and all who met him, however fleetingly, seem to have been left with the impression that they were his friend. Michel Galiana-Mingot, the former head of Sony France, remembers the day Morita went on an inspection tour of Sony's new plant in Bayonne. As he was driving away from the plant, Morita noticed a white house across the surrounding fields and asked to stop; the occupants, he explained, were Sony's neighbors and he wanted to meet them and pay his respects. The master of the house happened to be in the ice-cream business, and Morita spent an hour with his family sampling ice cream from all over Europe while the cavalcade of official cars and policemen on their motorcycles waited outside.

Morita had the gift of incandescence. People observing him in action at various moments in his life were left with the impression that he lit up a room with his presence, that he literally glowed. I have observed this effect myself. In February 1992, his penultimate year of good health, he put in an appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which I attended as an observer. He was by no means the only luminary present: Nelson Mandela, Prince Charles, Henry Kissinger and Li Peng were also in attendance. But it was Morita who turned heads as he strode across the outer hall greeting his friends, and Morita who stole the show in plenary sessions. Speaking from the stage in his earnest, imperfect yet vivid English, he assured the audience that they would find the Japanese market open to them--if and when they had something appealing to offer the Japanese consumer. Then he smiled his outrageous, radiant smile and suggested that the competitiveness of American industry might be improved if its leaders paid themselves less richly. Clearly this was a slap in the face, yet it was delivered with such warmth and collegiality, such familiar ease and good humor, that the American CEOs who had paid $14,000 to attend rose as though ensorcelled to applaud him.

The memory of Morita's brightness survives as part of his legacy to Sony. When I asked Norio Ohga, the company's current chairman, to explain why he had reached past the frontrunners in line to succeed him as president and picked Nobuyuki Idei, he wrote down on a pad in his elegant hand, san-san to kagayaku, an expression that means to shine dazzlingly like the sun. "The leader of Sony must have radiance," he said. Though he didn't bother to add, "like Akio Morita," there was no mistaking that Morita's presence had been invoked.

John Nathan is Takashima professor of Japanese cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of the new book Sony: The Private Life