Before founding the Sony Corporation, Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita served in the Japanese Imperial Navy during World War II.
On this day the foundations of the gigantic Japanese Sony Corporation were laid. Namely, in 1946 Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita in Tokyo founded a company to sell electrical equipment, under the name “Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo”. They started using the name Sony only after 1955 due to the U.S. market, where the name “Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo” was hard to pronounce. Similarly, the Japanese Panasonic was originally called Matsushita.
Before founding the Sony Corporation, Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita served in the Japanese Imperial Navy during World War II (Morita was even an officer). That is also where the two of them met. When Masaru Ibuka left the Navy after the war, he founded an electrical equipment store in Tokyo, in a former department store demolished by bombs. The following year Morita joined Ibuka, as a colleague from the Navy, and together they started a company. Those were the humble beginnings of what would become Sony.
Sony became a multinational corporation, but its headquarters are still in Tokyo. Today, they are the third-largest television manufacturer in the world and one of the largest electronics companies in general. The name Sony was chosen during the 1950s in order to indulge U.S. buyers. In fact, the name “Sony” is similar to the Latin word for sound (Sonus) and the American expression “Sonny Boy”, which was popular in the 1950s.
