JAPAN: Sayonara to a Corporate Era

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Dec 27 1994 (IPS) - The card sent out by the Morita family for the holidays has one of Japan’s most illustrious and charismatic business leaders brandishing a tennis racket, looking as competitive as ever.

But Akio Morita, co-founder of the electronics giant Sony Corporation, was also in a wheelchair. He remains partially paralysed after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage a year ago.

“The picture of seeing Japan’s best-known corporate leader stricken is sad,” says Sophia University Professor James Abegalan, who received a Morita greeting card. “He was a unique man even among the celebrated list of postwar Japanese business leaders.”

Last month, the 73-year-old Morita stepped down as chairman of Sony, a move the local and international media said marked an end to a era of hardworking postwar business leaders that led Japan to become Asia’s economic powerhouse.

Morita, along with Kazuo Iwama who died in 1982, founded Sony in 1958 and turned it into one of the world’s most popular — and profitable — consumer eletronics companies. And while his resignation is predicted to make little impact on Sony itself, experts say Japanese business will not be the same without Morita.

Known for its innovative products like the Walkman, Sony has stood out as an oddity in Japan’s straight-laced corporate world, “marching to its own drummer”, as the Asahi Shimbun newspaper put it a few years ago.

Business insiders say this was largely because of maverick Morita, who bypassed management and engineering graduates in favour of the likes of music major Norio Ohga. Morita nurtured Ohga for years, and in 1982 made the younger man Sony president.

We can make a decision in the morning and then change it the same afternoon, Tokyo Business, a respected journal quotes Ohga in a report that illustrates Ohga’s flexibility, a rare quality in Japanese business where caution is emphasised.

These days, how Ohga plans to resurrect a Morita-less Sony in the midst of the turbulence in Japan’s business world has become a landmark issue in the country’s corporate community.

“Sony is a venture business and represents flexibility and diversity against the conservative style of established Japanese corporations,” says business expert Hiroshi Fukunaga. “The way it performs could mark a revolution in Japanese business.”