Word: osaka
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...recent cover subjects, Ambassador Edwin Reischauer and Industrialist Konosuke Matsushita. Now experiencing what other cover subject have gone through, Matsushita joked that "for the next month I'll set aside five minutes a day to sign TIME covers." Auer visited Matsushita's new TV factory in Osaka, gave him the original coyer painting. Matsushita, bowing appreciatively, wondered whether the portrait made him look younger or older than he really is. Auer decided the moment called for Occidental inscrutability...
...frail orphan, to scratch for a living. With no family to discipline him in the rigid Japanese rules of life, which dictated that a boy must stick with his first employer for life. Matsushita at 1 6 deserted his job as apprentice bicycle repairman to join the Osaka Electric Light Co. because he saw more future in the infant electric industry. In eight years he had married and had a good position as a wiring inspector. But again he quit, scraping together $97.50 to start a tiny business making an electric socket he had designed. It failed miserably...
Neglected Cranny. Matsushita managed to exist alongside the grasping zaibatsu by slipping into a cranny of industry they cared nothing about: consumer goods. The Osaka zaibatsu even lent him money, with no attempt to dominate him. But his success came from introducing the Japanese to a brand of imaginative. Western-style salesmanship they had never seen. When retailers refused to believe that his battery-powered bicycle lamp would run 30 hours-ten times longer than any other then on the market-he left one turned on in each store. Before long, orders came streaming in, and Matsushita Electric...
...marriage, she has played a vital part in his business life, accompanying him on factory visits and often doing the final tests on home appliances that Matsushita is about to market. Currently, they live in a company-owned, 27-room Japanese-style home on a country estate between Osaka and Kobe, but will soon move to a six-room house on the same grounds, which is being westernized for comfort...
Most weeks, Matsushita goes to his Osaka office only for Monday business conferences. From there he is driven in his long black Cadillac (his only bit of ostentation) to a modest Kyoto town house where he occupies himself until Friday with his "old man's toy": the PHP, or Peace and Happiness through Prosperity Institute, which he set up in the desperate days after the war. In the monastic atmosphere of the institute's serene gardens, he sips tea, eats flower-petal cakes, and holds seminars with his three young research fellows, discussing how best to use abundance...