Biography | Akio Morita — The Sony Building Opened on This Sukiyabashi Corner

On 29 April 1966, the Sony Building opened beside the Sukiyabashi crossing in Ginza.

For Akio Morita, it offered more than an address where customers could inspect electronic products.

In an essay published just after the opening, he described the problem he and architect Yoshinobu Ashihara had tried to solve: how to draw pedestrians naturally through a small, expensive urban site.

Ashihara's answer divided each floor into four smaller levels, rising in ninety-centimetre steps around a central core.

The arrangement let visitors move through the displays as a continuous sequence, rather than repeatedly returning to an enclosed staircase.

Morita also backed a thirty-three-square-metre open space at the street corner.

In his account, the garden could change character, serving passersby with planting, water or temporary events.

Restaurants and shops broadened the building's appeal beyond its showroom.

Together, those decisions made the opening a significant moment in the way he presented Sony to the public.

The architecture was part of the communication, not simply a container for advertising.

Hong Kong's M+ museum preserves ceiling panels from the building and identifies it as an early project of Ashihara's independent practice.

Those surviving components record a material aspect of the visitor experience that photographs of the exterior can easily miss.

The original Sony Building was later demolished, and the site underwent a transformation into Ginza Sony Park.

A 2025 architectural account in Monocle traced the new park's staggered circulation and public character back to Ashihara's building.

That continuity does not mean the structure visible today is the one Morita opened in 1966.

The photograph attached here preserves a later view of the original building, before its demolition.

The location remains the Ginza corner where Sony used architecture, exhibition and a small public garden to invite people into its world.

Sources: [Morita's contemporary essay, reproduced by Sony](https://www.ginzasonypark.com/e/article/morita/); [M+ collection record](https://www.mplus.org.hk/en/collection/objects/ceiling-panels-sony-building-19641966-tokyo-japan-2017493/); [Monocle on the site's transformation](https://monocle.com/affairs/urbanism/ginza-sony-park/).

Photo: Leonard V Carlson (Picturetokyo), 10 May 2005, public domain, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sony_Building_Tokyo.jpg), resized. The photograph shows the original Sony Building thirty-nine years after opening; it is not an opening-day image.