‘Genius’ Made Sony Emblem Of New Japan

Masaru Ibuka, who guided Sony Corp.’s rise from a humble radio shop to a world electronics leader and helped change global perceptions of Japanese manufacturers in the process, died of heart failure Friday. He was 89.

Ibuka was a founder with Akio Morita and others of a company that later took the name Sony. Its success became an emblem of Japan’s rise from the ashes of World War II.

“Ibuka was a person of an entirely different dimension,” Sony Chairman Norio hga said in a statement Friday. “He saw his ideas come to fruition one after another, clearly standing apart from the great number of people who have ideas but never realize them.”

Those achievements included helping turn Sony into one of the first Japanese firms to successfully tackle global markets, helping transform the image of Japanese manufacturers from incompetents to world leaders.

Ibuka, nicknamed “genius inventor” in college, began producing radio parts after he started a repair shop in a bombed-out building in Tokyo in 1945 as Japan was struggling to rise from the ruins of defeat.

Joined by Morita and 20 others, Ibuka’s shop became Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corp., Sony’s former name.

Morita, 76, retired as chairman four years ago. One of Ibuka’s first products was Japan’s first tape recorder, “Type-G,” produced after years of original experimentation with magnetic tape and metal powders.

In the early 1950s, Sony bought the rights to an American invention called the transistor, and soon demonstrated the Japanese aptitude for creating revolutionary products out of existing technology.

Ibuka introduced Japan’s first transistor radio, “TR-55,” the beginning of a product line that made commonplace something many consumers had never imagined owning - cordless radios so small they fit in a pocket.

“At that time, research and development of transistor (technology) was largely aimed at industrial and military use,” Ibuka said in a speech in 1992 when he was honored by the government for his transistor radio invention. “Nobody was thinking about making use of it in commercial products.”

The company went on to shrink videotape recorders from huge machines run on vacuum tubes into compact, transistorized models that became a fixture in living rooms worldwide.

“He has sowed the seeds of deep conviction that our products must bring joy and fun to users,” Sony president Nobuyuki Idei said Friday.

In 1991, Ibuka wrote a book about his longtime friend Soichiro Honda, who founded Honda Motor Corp.

Ibuka is survived by a son and two daughters.