David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…You can inflation adjust all you want, you are not going to make that a meaningful number. It's unreal, and the country is just transformed. Japan is banned from having a military ever again. There are occupation forces that are running the government. The Imperial dynasty is at a minimum, not what it was before. Morita goes back home to Nagoya. Ibuka goes right back to Tokyo. The research project had been evacuated out of Tokyo before the end of the war as the bombings really started in Tokyo. He goes right back to Tokyo amidst all this, and what does he do? He founded a company. I think part of his vision, Morita would contribute to this too, but I think Ibuka really saw a huge opportunity after the war in that all this technology that had been focused on military and industrial use, but primarily military use, around the world and in Japan. Japan doesn't have a military anymore. You can't focus technology development on the military. The only thing you can do with technology, the only market you can serve is the consumer market. This is the moment where we realize that Ibuka is truly an irrational optimist. The National tenor couldn't be bleaker and yet Ibuka is like, let's start a company. Let's start it here in this completely war-torn, bombed-out old building. Sure, let's do it. Let's serve a market of people that have no disposable income.…

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