A controversial 1989 bestseller co-authored by Sony's co-founder Akio Morita and politician Shintaro Ishihara, arguing that Japan should take a more independent stance toward the United States in trade, technology, and foreign policy. Morita's chapters focused on Japanese management practices and the structural reasons behind Japan's industrial success, while Ishihara contributed more overtly nationalistic passages. Morita later removed his chapters from the English edition and distanced himself from the book after Ishihara's sections provoked sharp criticism in the US.
This book captures Morita's thinking at the peak of Japan's postwar economic dominance, when Sony had just bought Columbia Pictures (1989) and Japanese manufacturing seemed unbeatable. Morita's contributions reflect his belief that Japanese companies succeeded not through unfair trade practices but through superior management — long-term thinking, quality obsession, and employee engagement — and his frustration that American executives blamed trade barriers rather than their own short-termism. For founders building global companies, the book is a time capsule of how a non-American founder reasoned about competing with an incumbent superpower, and what it felt like to be on the winning side of a technological and economic shift that most people in the dominant market refused to acknowledge.
The second lesson is the cautionary one: Morita's association with Ishihara's nationalism damaged his reputation in the US and undermined the very global partnerships Sony needed. It is a reminder that founders who wade into political debates, especially across borders, risk their brand and their market access in ways that are hard to reverse.