The Engineer Toyota Did Not Want

Toyota turned him down. Investors laughed at the portable radio. Both men kept building anyway — and put their names on the front of empires.

Setting

Postwar Japan. The country lay flattened. Factories had been firebombed. Materials were rationed. Two engineers — Soichiro Honda in central Honshū and Akio Morita on the Pacific coast — were trying, separately, to build something out of the rubble. Both of them, in different rooms, were being told that what they wanted to do was impossible. Both of them kept going.

The story

Soichiro Honda had been an automotive engineer for years. He had built piston rings during the war and watched his factory be hit by American bombing. After the war he tried to take his designs to Toyota. He was rejected. The chronicles disagree on the exact reason — some say his prototypes did not meet specification, some say the personalities clashed — but the result is unambiguous. The man who would become Japan's most famous industrialist was told he was not good enough to work for an established firm.

He went home. He bolted small surplus engines onto bicycles and sold them to housewives who needed cheap transport in a country with no fuel. The contraptions were crude, popular, and profitable. Within a few years he had founded the Honda Motor Company. Within a generation, his name was on motorcycles in every country on earth, and on cars in most of them.

Akio Morita was working in parallel. He and his cofounder had begun a small electronics shop in a bombed-out department store in Tokyo. They wanted to build a portable radio — a transistor pocket radio, an idea that did not yet exist as a product. The investors they approached were, by Morita's own later account, openly contemptuous. The hammer of Japanese conformity, the warning that the nail which sticks out gets struck down, came down on them in board rooms and in private meetings. The idea, they were told, was ridiculous. Who would buy something so small? Where would it go in the home?

He kept building. The company he and his partner founded was renamed Sony, and the portable radio they put on the market changed how the species listened to music. Within twenty years they had also given the world the Walkman, the Trinitron, and a long string of consumer electronics that became part of everyday life on every continent.

The two men never seem to have met for a definitive conversation about what kept them going through the rejections. But they were operating, in different industries, on the same principle. The hammer falls hardest on the nail that has begun to rise but has not yet risen out of reach. The phase between ordinary and undeniable is the phase where almost everyone gives up. The two of them simply did not give up.

What it teaches

This is gaman — silent perseverance through hardship — applied to ambition rather than to suffering. Both men were operating in a culture that taught its young the proverb deru kui wa utareru, the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Both of them treated the proverb not as a warning but as a description. The criticism would come; the rejection would come; the laughter would come. The only question was whether the work would continue through it. The point of perseverance is not heroism. It is the simple recognition that the harshest resistance arrives precisely at the threshold between not yet and undeniable. Most people stop there. Those who keep going past that point eventually pass out of the hammer's reach.