索尼创始人盛田昭夫 | 经济学人讣告

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Akio Morita

盛田昭夫

英文部分选自经济学人19991007期讣告

Akio Morita

盛田昭夫

Akio Kyuzaemon Morita, the man who made Sony, died on October 3rd, aged 78

Obituary • Oct 7th 1999

索尼创始人盛田昭夫，于1999年10月3日辞世，享年78岁。

AT A restaurant in Dusseldorf in the 1950s Akio Morita was served with a bowl of ice-cream decorated with a miniature parasol. The friendly German waiter pointed out that the paper bauble was made in Japan. For Mr Morita it was a disheartening experience: that the world associated “made in Japan” with trinkets and cheap imitations. For the rest of his working life he sought to prove to foreigners that “made in Japan” meant originality, quality and value for money. Keizo Obuchi, the Japanese prime minister, got it right when he said this week that Mr Morita was “the engine that pulled the Japanese economy”.

上世纪50年代，盛田昭夫坐在杜索尔多夫一家餐馆里，点了一份冰淇淋，上面装饰着一只迷你伞。友善的德国服务员告诉他，这个纸制的小装饰品产自日本。这件事让盛田昭夫心里很不是滋味：因为一提起“日本制造”，全世界的人只会想起各种小玩意儿或廉价仿制品。因此他在往后的职业生涯中，都致力于向外国人证明：“日本制造”意味着创意、品质和物有所值。日本首相小渊惠三在本周的讲话中称盛田昭夫是“拉动日本经济发展的引擎”，所言极是。

注释：

小渊惠三，日本政治家，曾于1998年7月至2000年4月担任日本首相，在职期间扭转了日本经济下滑的局面。

At heart, the man who made Sony a worldwide name was a tinkerer. He retained a childlike curiosity in pulling things apart to see how they worked. Even back in the 1930s his wealthy parents had many of the trappings of western life: a car plus all the electrical appliances of the day. The teenage Akio spent hours dismantling the family record-player and rebuilding it. His other passions were physics and mathematics. In the second world war, while serving in the Japanese navy, he met a fellow enthusiast for technology, Masaru Ibuka. In 1946, the two started a telecommunications company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, with 20 employees, the precursor of Sony.

这位让索尼公司家喻户晓的创始人在内心深处是一位匠人。他保留着孩童般的好奇心，拆卸机械，探究其运转模式。盛田昭夫家境富裕，上世纪30年代他的父母就已经拥有许多西式物件，包括一辆小汽车，还有那个年代所有的家用电器。十几岁的盛田昭夫能花上数小时拆卸家用留声机，然后重新组装。此外，他还热衷于物理和数学。二战期间在日本海军服役时，他遇见了同样对科技充满热情的井深大。1946年，二人一同创立了东京通信工业株式会社，即索尼的前身，还有了20名雇员。

注释：

井深大，索尼公司创办人之一，日本发明协会会长，日本著名企业家，教育家。

As things turned out, Mr Ibuka looked after research and product development while Mr Morita went out to raise the money and sell the goods. Mr Morita's great early coup was to persuade America's giant Western Electric to license its transistor know-how to his tiny firm (a move that infuriated Japan's powerful trade ministry, which was by-passed). After his chastening experience in Dusseldorf, Mr Morita journeyed on to Eindhoven in the Netherlands where the great Dutch electrical group, Philips, had its headquarters. Here was a company in a small country that had created a global brand. “If Philips can do it,” he wrote home to Mr Ibuka, “perhaps we can also manage.”

后来，井深大负责产品研发；盛田昭夫则负责融资销售。他早期的一大成功就在于说服了美国电子巨头西电公司（Western Electric）把晶体管技术授权给自己的这家小公司。此举绕开了权势颇大的日本经济产业省，让其大为火光。结束杜塞尔多夫的懊恼之旅后，盛田昭夫便前往荷兰大型电气集团飞利浦的总部所在地埃因霍温。飞利浦虽诞生于荷兰这个小国家，却打造出了全球知名的大品牌。“如果飞利浦能做到，”他在给井深大的信中写道，“也许我们也能做到。”

注释：

1.Western Electric美国西电是专注于工业自动化与信息化的公司，总部位于美国科罗拉多州。

2.日本经济产业省成立于1949年5月，负责促进民间经济增长及对外关系发展。（日本的“省”相当于中国的“部”，和中文中“省”的行政区划意义不同。比如文部科学省相当于中国的教育部，文化部和科技部，厚生劳动省类似于医疗卫生和社会保障部门。）

A star is born

新星诞生

Clearly, the tongue-twister, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, had to go. Mr Morita combined the Latin word for sound, sonus, with the English expression “sonny-boy” to give an impression of a company that was full of energy and youthful exuberance. Keeping things to essentials underlay many of Mr Morita's creative decisions. In the late 1970s he asked the engineers at Sony to build a miniature stereo sound system. People could listen to music while exercising, he said. The Walkman has become synonymous with Sony, and immensely profitable. Sony charges a hefty premium for the creative content its brand name implies.

显然，绕口的“东京通信工业株式会社”必须改名。盛田昭夫将拉丁语表示声音的单词sonus与英语表达sonny-boy（机灵小子)结合起来，以彰显公司的活力十足和青春洋溢。把握事物本质是盛田昭夫诸多创造性决策的底层逻辑。70年代后期，他让索尼的工程师做了一个微型立体声系统。他说有了这台设备，人们就可以边锻炼边听音乐了。“随身听”已成为索尼的代名词，为索尼创造了丰厚利润。索尼品牌成为了有创意的代名词，也获得了高额的溢价。

注释：

sonny-boy: In 1950s Japan, “sonny boys” was a loan word in Japanese, which connoted smart and presentable young men, which Sony founders Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka considered themselves to be.

There were disasters too. The Betamax video recorder was one. Though considered marginally better than the VHS recorder launched a year later in 1975 by the Japan Victor Company (both were based on an American design), the Sony version left little room for future improvement. Worse, Mr Morita upset manufacturers who wanted to make the Betamax recorder by driving too hard a bargain. The VHS design prospered and Mr Morita's Betamax lay dead in the water. A foray into Hollywood in 1989 also turned out to be an ill-judged, costly adventure. With that, the man who built up Sony as a global enterprise almost brought it to its knees.

索尼也有折戟沉沙之时。Betamax格式录像机就是其中之一。尽管索尼的录像机被认为比日本胜利公司晚一年（1975年)推出的VHS格式录像机略胜一筹（二者均基于美国的一款设计），但索尼的版本几乎没有未来提升的空间。更糟糕的是，盛田昭夫对那些有生产Betamax摄像机意愿的生产商压价太狠，引起了厂商的不满。VHS设计大获全胜，而盛田昭夫的Betamax死在了沙滩上。1989年进军好莱坞的行动也因判断失误、代价高昂而失败。正因为此，这个一手将索尼打造成全球性企业的男人，险些将其葬送。

Mr Morita gave the impression of being a contradiction. Those close to him speak of the two sides to his personality. There was the strict Japanese traditionalist, the eldest son of a 300-year-old sake-brewing family in Nagoya who disinherited his own eldest son, Hideo Morita, for marrying without his consent. To the outside world he was a jovial, talkative and incandescent personality who illuminated a room and fired imaginations. It was an act Mr Morita worked hard to perfect. With his tanned skin from skiing and tennis, bluish eyes, rare among Japanese, and mane of white hair parted in the middle, he looked the dandy. Hideo Morita called his father a “consummate performer” whom no one outside the inner family ever saw unmasked. “He had to act as the most international-understanding businessman in Japan,” was how the son described him to John Nathan for his book, “Sony: The Private Life”, published in September. Like Soichiro Honda and other entrepreneurs of his generation, Mr Morita embraced the outside world, America especially, because there was so little to be exploited in post-war Japan. The domestic market was sewn up by pre-war giants such as Toshiba, Hitachi, Mitsubishi and relative newcomers like Matsushita. But embracing the outside world did not mean that Mr Morita enjoyed it.

盛田昭夫是一个矛盾体。身边熟悉他的人说他有双重性格。一面是恪守传统的日本人，做为名古屋300年酿酒世家的长子，废除了自己长子盛田英夫的继承权，原因是长子的婚姻未得他的允许。而在外部世界，他给人的印象又是亲切快活的，健谈、热情，有他的地方就热闹、言语天马行空。盛田昭夫一直努力维护人前亲和宽容的形象。因冲浪和网球晒得黝黑的皮肤、浅蓝色的眼睛，在日本人中很少见，白色的头发梳成中分，气宇不凡。盛田英夫称他父亲为“完美的演员”，除了面对内部家庭成员，他从不卸下面具。在约翰·内森九月份出版的的书《索尼的私人生活》中，盛田英夫描述父亲：“他必须装成日本最国际化的商人”。跟和他同时代的本田宗一郎等企业家一样，盛田昭夫积极拥抱外部世界，尤其是北美，因为战后的日本可开发利用的资源很少。日本国内市场已被东芝、日立、三菱等战前巨头和松下等后起之秀所垄断。尽管盛田昭夫积极融入外部世界，但他并不享受这一过程。

He had to subjugate his traditional sense of decorum; he had to learn not only to speak English but also to think English; he had to learn to say yes or no when the weight of a dozen generations of family tradition pressed him to be ambivalent. On occasion, he misread foreign sensitivities. He tried to prevent the English translation of a book, “A Japan That Can Say No”, of which he was co-author with a right-wing politician, Shintaro Ishihara, and subsequently distanced himself from it. Mr Morita's lifelong campaign to embed Sony in the hearts and minds of foreigners seems to have been a painful struggle. He bore the pain well.

他必须压制自己骨子里的传统观念；他不仅要会说英文，还要用西方的思维方式思考；尽管代代相传的家庭传统教他说话做事要留余地，但他却必须要学会用直接的yes or no。有时他也会对外国的一些敏感元素产生误读。他和右翼政客石原慎太郎合著了《日本可以说不》，却试图阻止该书翻译成英文，随后又想和该书划清界限。盛田昭夫倾尽一生让外国人全心支持索尼，这似乎是一场痛苦的斗争，但他无怨无悔。

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