Semiconductor History | 日本橋白木屋 — Twenty People, ¥190,000, and a Corner of a Burnt Department Store

On 7 May 1946 a company was founded on the third floor of a bombed-out department store in Nihonbashi, with capital of 190,000 yen and about twenty employees.

The store was 白木屋, damaged in the air raids and still trading around the space it rented out. The company was 東京通信工業, and in 1958 it renamed itself Sony.

井深大 was thirty-eight and had spent the war making precision instruments for the army and navy; 盛田昭夫 was twenty-five, from a sake-brewing family in Aichi that put up money and personally guaranteed the young company's debts.

Neither of them took the top job.

They installed 前田多門, a former Minister of Education, as nominal first president, and brought in 万代順四郎, a former head of Teikoku Bank, as adviser — two establishment names borrowed to make a twenty-person workshop creditable to banks and customers.

井深 ran engineering, 盛田 ran sales and finance, and the borrowed reputations opened the doors.

The founding prospectus 井深 had drafted that January asked for something specific: a workplace where engineers could work freely and with pleasure, an ideal factory rather than a large one.

That document is quoted in Japan the way American founders quote garages, and unlike most founding scenes it is a piece of paper that actually exists.

They outgrew the department store quickly and moved to a seventy-tsubo warehouse at 御殿山 in 北品川, where the roof leaked badly enough that people worked under umbrellas.

Japan's first tape recorder came out of that shed in 1950, and Japan's first transistor radio, the TR-55, in 1955 — second in the world, after the American Regency TR-1 of 1954, and the beginning of Japanese consumer electronics.

The Nihonbashi building is gone.

白木屋 became a 東急 department store, which closed in January 1999 and was demolished; the site is now the COREDO 日本橋 complex, above 三越前 station, and the first photograph here shows the Tokyu store in its final weeks rather than anything Sony ever occupied.

Photo: Imtn, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (the Tokyu department store on this site, photographed shortly before it closed in January 1999).

Photo: Ogawa Kazumasa, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (the Shirokiya store at Nihonbashi in 1911 — an earlier building on the same site, decades before the one Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo rented).