[VOID] Biography | Akio Morita — Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo Founded in This Shirokiya Room

People point at a glass tower in Shinagawa and call it the birthplace of Sony.

The company was incorporated in a borrowed room over a department store.

In October 1945 Masaru Ibuka rented about thirty square metres on the third floor of Shirokiya in Nihonbashi.

The windows still lacked glass.

He hung a sign for Tokyo Tsushin Kenkyujo, a radio-repair and research shop in a building scarred by the air raids.

Akio Morita, then twenty-four, found him through a newspaper.

The Asahi Shimbun’s Blue Pencil column had described Ibuka’s new workshop.

The two men had already met in 1945 on the navy’s wartime research committee.

Morita left the family brewery track and came to Tokyo.

On 7 May 1946 they incorporated Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha, Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation.

Sony’s own history records the capital as 190,000 yen and the headcount as just over twenty.

Ibuka’s father-in-law, Tamon Maeda, a former education minister, became president.

Morita, at twenty-five, joined the managing side.

His father Kyuzaemon sat among the early advisers who watched the books.

The staff worked after the store closed and sometimes found themselves locked in for the night.

Within a month the Shirokiya room was already too small.

Sony’s later capsule history says the next shared roof was a leaky warehouse in Shinagawa.

Shirokiya later became the Tokyu Department Store Nihonbashi branch.

That store closed on 31 January 1999.

The 1946 room is gone.

The site is now the Nihonbashi 1-chome Mitsui Building, opened in 2004, with COREDO Nihonbashi in the lower floors.

A visitor today walks into a shopping atrium, not a glassless workshop.

The founding date did not move with the rebuild.

7 May 1946 is still the day Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo began, in this block, on that floor.