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Masaru Ibuka, 89, Engineer And Sony Co-Founder, Dies

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December 20, 1997, Section D, Page 16Buy Reprints
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Masaru Ibuka, a low-key engineer who co-founded one of Japan's greatest postwar successes, the Sony Corporation, died yesterday at his home in Tokyo.

Mr. Ibuka, who was 89, died from heart failure, Sony said in an announcement.

Guided by Mr. Ibuka, Sony helped establish Japan's reputation for innovation by defying a tradition of copying products of others. Although Mr. Ibuka was often publicly overshadowed by his outspoken and flamboyant fellow co-founder, Akio Morita, he was an imaginative technician who personally helped create some of Sony's most popular consumer products.

He led the research and development team, for instance, that developed Sony's extremely successful Trinitron color television in 1967.

That was one in a string of developments that made Sony one of the most admired and competitive consumer products companies in the world, with innovations like the Walkman and advanced video cameras to come later.

Mr. Ibuka was born in 1908 in the handsome mountain town of Nikko and received a degree in engineering from the prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo in 1933. That same year he won a prize at an exhibition in Paris for a modulated light transmission system while working for Photo-Chemical Laboratory, a company involved principally in processing motion picture film.

He worked at a series of other scientific companies until 1946, when in the devastation of bombed-out Tokyo, he and Mr. Morita founded a company originally called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K., or the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation.

Mr. Ibuka wrote the new company's idealistic prospectus on May 7, 1946, stating, ''If it were possible to establish conditions where persons can become united with a firm spirit of teamwork and exercise to their hearts' desire their technological capacity, then the operation of such an organization would bring untold pleasure and untold benefits.''

He added, ''We shall focus on highly sophisticated technical products that have great usefulness in society.''

One of their first innovations was a kind of magnetic recording tape in 1949. In 1950 the fledgling company began to market the first tape recorder in Japan, followed in 1955 by Japan's first transistor radios and, in 1960, the first transistor televisions.

In 1958 the company changed its name to the Sony Corporation, a title that had no particular meaning, Mr. Morita later recalled, but had a popular ring and sounded a little like the word ''Sonny'' that many of the American soldiers occupying Japan had used in calling Japanese children. It was one sign that the company understood not just technical innovation, but marketing, which remains one of its strengths.

''Mr. Ibuka has been at the heart of Sony's philosophy,'' said Nobuyuki Idea, Sony's current president. ''He has sowed the seeds of the deep conviction that our products must bring joy and fun to users. Mr. Ibuka always asked himself what was at the core of 'making things,' and thought in broad terms of how these products could enhance people's lives and cultures.''

Mr. Ibuka was Sony's president from 1950 to 1971, then chairman to 1976, when he retired from active participation in the company and became honorary chairman. The company was led for almost two decades after that by Mr. Morita, whose white mane and tart tongue made him one of the best-known and most controversial executives in Japan.

While he defended Japan at times against charges of unfair trade practices, Mr. Morita was one of the first prominent people in the country to acknowledge openly that the Japanese Government and major corporations did work closely and in tandem to keep foreign companies and foreign products out of the country. He was also one of the first, in the heat of some of the most bitter trade battles between the United States and Japan, to demand that Japan open its markets.

But Mr. Morita always did so in the context of insisting that Japan and Sony had developed systems for operating companies that the West, and the United States in particular, ought to emulate rather than criticize.

While he withdrew from active involvement in Sony, Mr. Ibuka remained involved in a number of outside activities for years. He followed his interest in education, for instance, by serving as chairman of the Early Development Association. He was chairman of Boy Scouts of Japan from 1985 to 1994.

He was decorated numerous times by the Emperor and received honorary degrees from, among other institutions, Brown University, in 1994. He also received a humanism and technology award from the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies in 1981.

Mr. Ibuka is survived by a son and two daughters.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 16 of the National edition with the headline: Masaru Ibuka, 89, Engineer And Sony Co-Founder, Dies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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