Word: ibuka
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Early experience as a victim has moved some medical saints to serve others. As a girl, Yaeko Ibuka was sent to a leprosarium near Mount Fuji. There she became a Catholic and resigned herself to disfigurement and death, only to be told that she did not have leprosy after all. Though free to return home, she says, she "understood for the first time the power of God's love," and stayed. Now, 55 years later, Yaeko Ibuka is known as "the angel of Fukusei Byoin." At 78, she continues to offer her gentle, unstinting care to the lepers...
...manufacturer of soy sauce and sake, Morita started out as an engineer. As a wartime navy lieutenant he was assigned to help an engineer named Masaru Ibuka develop a heat-seeking bomb. After the defeat, Ibuka opened a communications-equipment business in a Tokyo shed, and Morita joined him. The two begged and borrowed $500 to start Tokyo Telecommunications Co., later Sony. Ibuka, who was Mr. Inside, developed the products and became president; Morita, Mr. Outside, specialized in marketing and became executive vice president. Sony succeeded because its chiefs were among the first Japanese businessmen who did not copy Western...
...long string of Sony products followed: the first small transistorized TVs, the world's smallest AM radio, even the video-tape cassette recorders used by U.S. astronauts on Apollo moon flights. Their development is a tribute to Ibuka's inventiveness and Sony's highly flexible operating methods. The company, says Morita, is not constricted by a formal research and development budget; it simply pours as much money as seems necessary into a promising idea. Sony's top managers also frequently tear up the organization table, assigning people from throughout the company to work on what looks like the next...