To the influential Americans and Europeans who knew Morita over time–and they were legion–he was a striking contrast to the “typical” Japanese businessmen they encountered in their professional lives. Morita seemed neither reticent, uncomfortable, aloof, nor inscrutable. On the contrary, he was a dynamo of dazzling energy, gregarious, fun-loving and, most appealingly, to all appearances, very like themselves. In the words of Peter Peterson, chairman of the Blackstone Group, “When it came time for Akio to do business in the United States, whether it was joint ventures, or licensing or whatever, he could pick up the phone and talk to almost any businessman in America. And instead of it being ‘Who is this again?’ and interpreters and all that sort of thing, Akio knew these people at the human level, at the personal level. And let’s be honest: to many American businessmen, the Japanese business culture is foreign.”
But did Pete Peterson–or any Westerner–really understand Akio Morita “at the personal level”? Was Morita as effortlessly at ease in the company of his foreign friends as he appeared; was he truly familiar and at home with their way of perceiving the world and behaving in it? There is no unambiguous answer; but there is evidence that Morita had to labor hard to achieve what may have been the illusion of familiarity. There is even room for speculation that his lifelong campaign to establish Sony in the West required a painful internal struggle to reconcile two incongruent views of the world–one that came naturally, while the other had to be acquired, or at least imitated, if international success was to be achieved. From this vantage point, Morita is revealed as the paradigmatic hero of Japan’s postwar age, a man caught, in the words of novelist and Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, “between the opposite poles of an ambiguity.” The poles Oe has in mind are, of course, Japanese culture on one hand and Western culture on the other. It seems likely that Morita, like Oe himself, lived his life as an international businessman with this polarization, in Oe’s phrase, “imprinted on [him] like a deep scar.”
According to Hideo Morita, Akio’s eldest son and the current head of the family, his father was a consummate performer all his life. No one, foreign or Japanese, ever saw Akio unmasked: “If you want to play a king,” Hideo told me, speaking in English, “you have to be like a king all the time; my father was very good at that, and so am I. He had an image of himself as the head of the Morita family, the 15th generation, and also as the president of one of the fastest-growing companies in Japan. And also he had to act–I’m sorry to use that word but I can’t help it–he had to act as the most international-understanding businessman in Japan. He tried very hard, and he worked and he studied hard to play that role. I admire that. But it was never real. He could never be good at any of those roles, including as a husband, including as a father.”
Hideo Morita’s assessment should not be surprising. Akio Morita was raised in a traditional Japanese family and, notwithstanding the way he appeared on his international rounds, was a stricter traditionalist at home than his own father. The polite Japanese word for wife–oku-sama–means, literally, “the personage at the rear of the house.” Morita expected Yoshiko, his own wife, to come forward when he needed her to manage their social environment, and to remain in the background where he was certain she belonged at other times. As a father, Morita recreated the family hierarchy that he had experienced in his own childhood. “I was told ever since I was a kid that I was not allowed to talk back to my father,” says Hideo Morita: “What he said was his decision.”
There is abundant evidence that Morita often appraised “Westerners” from the opposite side of a cultural divide. He worked hard to decipher the cultural puzzles that stood between him and them, but he was always aware of the chasm and at pain to hide the distance he felt. A case in point was his immoderate agitation in 1989 when a pirated translation of “The Japan That Can Say No”–a collection of excerpts from speeches by Morita and Shintaro Ishihara, a nationalist member of the Diet –circulated in Washington. Though Morita’s portion of the book was relatively bland, a rehashing of his set-pieces on foreign trade, he was furious about the English version–it was as if a mask he had always been careful to wear in the presence of his Western friends had slipped.
There is no way to measure the extent to which Akio Morita simulated the qualities that allowed his foreign friends and associates to place their confidence in him. But one thing is certain. Morita represented at least the possibility of genuine communication between Japan and the United States. That possibility survives Morita’s death; it is the legacy of a great man.
