{"id":48260,"date":"1999-10-05T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1999-10-05T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/95071fe1-1dfb-11e4-aedf-250bc8c9958e"},"modified":"1999-10-05T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"1999-10-05T00:00:00","slug":"95071ff4-1dfb-11e4-aedf-250bc8c9958e","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/95071ff4-1dfb-11e4-aedf-250bc8c9958e\/","title":{"rendered":"Our profound sense of condolences"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Issue:  The untimely passing of Mr. Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony Corp. who made a difference in rebuilding Japan&#8217;s economy.<\/p>\n<p>Our View:  We extend our most profound sense of condolences to the Morita family and the people of Japan in these difficult times.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Politicians and business executives mourned the death of Sony Corp. co-founder Ako Morita, lauding the entrepreneur who helped change Japan&#8217;s image from a maker of slipshod products to world class manufacturer.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Morita was a leading figure who played a pivotal role in developing Japan&#8217;s postwar economy&#8221;, Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi was quoted as saying.  He was one of 400 world dignitaries who visited the home of the world renowned businessman.<\/p>\n<p>The late &#8220;Morita co-founded the electronics giant in a bombed out department store after World War II.  He was the last of a generation of Japanese industrialists that included carmaker Soichiro Honda and electronics rival Konosuke Matsushita.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, who co-authored &#8220;The Japan That Can Say No&#8221;, with Morita, called him an exceptional businessman with a cosmopolitan outlook.  &#8220;He had the international mind that Japan lacked in the past and looked at Japan&#8217;s place in the world with a sense of relativity&#8221;, he said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Sony Corp. began in 1946 when Morita, the oldest son of a rice wine-brewer, joined former Japanese navy colleague Masaru Ibuka, a fellow engineer, to start a business repairing radios on a borrowed $500.  Using old parts and ingenuity in Japan&#8217;s harsh postwar economy, he and Ibuka produced Japan&#8217;s first magnetic recording tape and tape recorder in 1950.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;They made Japan&#8217;s first transistors in 1954 after convincing government industrial planners to allow their upstart company to buy the rights to the American device.  They made Japan&#8217;s first all-transistor radio in 1955.  Sony made the world&#8217;s first all-transistor television in 1960 and the first home video tape recorder in 1965.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;With Morita as president of Sony&#8217;s US subsidiary, Sony in 1970 became the first Japanese firm to be listed on the New Stock Exchange and in 1972, became one of the first Japanese companies to build a US factory. Perhaps the company&#8217;s most famous success was the Walkman personal stereo cassette player, which Sony began selling in the 1980s.  Today, Sony continues to lead the world in electronics and computer entertainment.<\/p>\n<p>For a world renown industrialist with humble beginnings who played a key role in the reconstruction of Japan&#8217;s economy after World War II, he most assuredly demonstrated to the entire global community what leadership is all about in a highly competitive global market.  Our most profound condolences to the Morita family and the people of Japan in the loss of a great mind and industrial giant.  Si Yuus Maase`!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Issue:  The untimely passing of Mr. Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony Corp. who made a difference in rebuilding Japan&#8217;s economy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}