Technology History | Sony — The Third-Floor Room in Shirokiya, Nihonbashi

People treat Sony as a Shinagawa campus that arrived already named, with a Walkman on the drawing board.

The company was incorporated here, in a rented room on the third floor of the Shirokiya department store in Nihonbashi, on 7 May 1946.

Masaru Ibuka had opened a small Tokyo Tsushin Kenkyusho in that building in October 1945. Akio Morita came down from Nagoya. With Tachikawa and a handful of others they formed Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo — Totsuko — with 190,000 yen in capital and just over twenty people. Ibuka told them they would not beat the giants by copying them; they would look for the niches the giants would not bother with.

They did not stay. The store wanted the floor back. A winter of split workshops followed, then an old carburetor warehouse at Gotenyama in Shinagawa in January 1947, with holes in the floor and stars through the roof. The name Sony was painted on products in 1955 and put on the company in 1958. The Konan headquarters is later still.

Shirokiya itself is gone. The plot is the Nihonbashi block now under Coredo and Mitsukoshi. The founding room was a borrowed floor in a department store, not a factory with a logo on the gate.