Masaru Ibuka

Masaru Ibuka was a Japanese electronics industrialist and co-founder of Sony, along with Akio Morita. He was born on April 11, 1908, as the first son of Tasuku Ibuka, an architectural technologist and a student of Inazo Nitobe. His ancestral family were chief retainers of the Aizu Domain, and his relatives include Yae Ibuka and Ibuka Kajinosuke. Masaru lost his father at the age of two and was taken over by his grandfather. He later moved to Kobe after his mother remarried. He passed the entrance exam to Hyogo Prefectural 1st Kobe Boys' School and was very happy about this success. He graduated from Waseda University in 1933, with the B.S. degree in electrical communications. His thesis was on an experimental projection-type television system using a nitro-benzol Kerr cell, a pair of Nichol's prisms, and a carbon arc with a rotating mirror wheel. He also conducted experiments on Kerr-cell-modulated light-beam channel distant speech communications, etc. After graduation from Waseda University, he joined Photo-Chemical Laboratories Inc., in Tokyo, where he was engaged in the research into the technology of sound recording on movie films (1933-1937). From 1937 to 1940, he was associated with Nippon-Ko-On (Japan Opto-Acoustic) Industrial Co., Tokyo, and worked on the development and production of home sound movie equipment. He served as senior managing director of the Japan Measuring Instrument Co., Ltd. from 1940 to 1945, a company engaged in the production of mechanoelectronic frequency-selective relays and other devices for telecommunication systems. In the fall of 1945, he left the company and navy, and founded a radio repair shop in the bombed out Shirokiya Department Store in Nihonbashi, Tokyo. In 1946, a fellow wartime researcher, Akio Morita, saw a newspaper article about Ibuka's new venture and after some correspondence, chose to join him in Tokyo. With funding from Morita's father, they co-founded Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation, which became known as Sony Corporation in 1958. Ibuka was instrumental in securing the licensing of transistor technology from Bell Labs to Sony in the 1950s, thus making Sony one of the first companies to apply transistor technology to non-military uses. He also led the research and development team that developed Sony's Trinitron color television in 1967. Ibuka served as president of Sony from 1950 to 1971, and then served as chairman of Sony from 1971 until he retired in 1976. Ibuka was awarded the Medal of Honor with Blue Ribbon in 1960, and was decorated with the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1978 and with the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun in 1986. He was further decorated as a Commander First Class of the Royal Order of the Polar Star of Sweden in that year, named a Person of Cultural Merit in 1989 and decorated with the Order of Culture in 1992. Ibuka received Honorary Doctorates from Sophia University, Tokyo in 1976, from Waseda University, Tokyo in 1979, and from Brown University (US) in 1994. The IEEE awarded him the IEEE Founders Medal in 1972 and named the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award after him in 1987. Ibuka served as the Chairman of the National Board of Governors of the Boy Scouts of Nippon. He also wrote several books, including Kindergarten is Too Late, which advocated early childhood education. He died of heart failure at age 89 on December 19, 1997. He was survived by a son and two daughters.