[VOID] Biography | Akio Morita — The Walkman Press Day Began in This Park

People remember the Walkman as a gadget that sold itself.

The first press day almost buried it.

On 22 June 1979 Sony collected journalists at the Sony Building in Ginza and put them on a bus.

Each reporter received a TPS-L2.

The bus went to Yoyogi Park.

Staff and hired students already had the machines on.

They jogged, rode a tandem, and skated while the journalists pressed play.

The explanation of the product arrived through the headphones, not from a lectern.

Most papers ignored the event or gave it a few lines.

Sony put the TPS-L2 on sale in Japan on 1 July 1979.

Contemporary figures for the list price sit at 30,000 or 33,000 yen.

The first production run was 30,000 units.

Sony’s later official history says only about 3,000 had sold by the end of July.

The device had no record function.

Reporters treated that as a defect.

Ibuka had asked for a portable stereo he could take on a plane.

Engineers started from the Pressman, a monaural recorder already sold to journalists, and stripped the record circuit.

Morita backed a four-month sprint to have a player in shops before the school summer holiday.

Kozo Ohsone’s group made that deadline.

When the press failed, the domestic marketing staff took units onto Tokyo trains and handed headphones to strangers.

By the end of August the first run was gone.

The park stunt looks obvious now.

On the day, it looked like a company asking people to walk around in public wearing earmuffs attached to a brick that could not even record.

This pin is the park, not the Ginza lobby where the bus loaded.

The moment that changed the product’s luck was the second campaign, on the trains.

The moment Sony chose to explain the idea was here.