Sony: The Private Life

In the wastelands of post-war Tokyo, two men, Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka, formed the company that was to become one of the greatest corporations of the 20th century. John Nathan tells the story of how a small family business became a multi-national with a turnover of billions, whose products are sold throughout the world. Sony matched its revolutionary technology with revolutionary methods of marketing - it was one of the first corporations to embrace globalization. So began a dramatic clash of two cultures, one rooted in Japanese native tradition and the other irreconcilably western. In relating the history of this clash John Nathan has also written a cultural history of Japan in the last 50 years. The disastrous purchase of Columbia Pictures took Sony into a world for which it was utterly unprepared, exacerbated by the cultural clash. This is the fullest analysis yet of this dramatic period, put together despite Sony's policy of silence about many of the details.