This week on Behind the Business, we'll be taking a look at one of the most innovative companies to ever emerge from Japan.
The inventor of such brilliant technologies as the transistor radio, the Walkman, the CD player and the PS Vita, Sony.
Our story begins in March 1945.
World War 2 was still in full swing, but by that point the Axis powers were crumbling.
Russians were swimming in the Oder, Hitler was on suicide watch, and a fleet of Boeing B-29s was firebombing Japan into oblivion.
The bombing of Tokyo on March 9 was the deadliest air raid in history, and it threw the Japanese military into panic mode.
Numerous emergency meetings were held that week, and one such meeting brought together two men that would eventually change the course of history: Masaru Ibuka, a Navy lieutenant, and Akio Morita, a weapons researcher.
Their brief military careers ended just a few months later when the Japanese Empire surrendered, and faced with unemployment, the two men found work wherever they could.
Masaru got a job repairing radios for a department store, but in 1946 he convinced Akio and several of his friends to start a business together.
They borrowed $530 as initial capital and founded the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation, or Totsuko for short.
