Akio Morita & Masaru Ibuka

In 1944, a young officer in the Japanese Imperial Navy met a civilian radio engineer, 13 years his senior, on a task force to develop a heat-seeking missile. Within two years, World War II had ended, Japan was trying to rebuild its industrial base, and the two men were working together tinkering with radios and other electrical gadgets in a small Tokyo office. Akio Morita, the naval officer, and Masaru Ibuka, the engineer, would stay partners and friends for more than 40 years, along the way building Sony, one of the iconic brands of the Japanese economic miracle.

Japan, of course, has had not one economic miracle but two — the first came after the Meiji Restoration, when a feudal society modernized itself so quickly that within two generations, the Japanese navy was able to rout the Russian one. But the scale of Japan’s economic recovery after 1945 boggles the mind even more. At the end of the war the economy was, quite literally, in ashes; within 17 years of heady growth at the rate now seen in China, The Economist magazine was able to say, “Apostles of conventional wisdom from the entire world should be coming to Japan to study just how to emulate it.”

Emulation — which has been attempted by many — has proved easier said than done, at least in part because few other nations have been able to develop corporations whose branded goods have a reputation for quality with the facility of the Japanese. The company Morita and Ibuka built was key to that process. Their genius did not just consist of identifying consumer goods that were perfectly pitched for the time and place — in postwar Japan, tape recorders; then transistor radios and color TVs; then, in the 1980s, the Walkman — but of recognizing the benefits of thinking on a global scale. From the 1950s on, Morita spent much of his time in the U.S. In 1961, Sony became the first Japanese company to have its stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and a year later the first Japanese flag to fly in New York City since before the war appeared over Sony’s midtown showrooms.

At the heart of Sony’s long years of success was the relationship between its two founders — Ibuka the engineering fiddler, taking gadgets apart on the floor of his office to see how they worked; Morita the sleek manager, scion of an old sake-brewing family, friend of the great and good on three continents. The men had very different styles, but they complemented each other. “In good times and bad, we were always together,” the wife of an ailing Morita said on his behalf at Ibuka’s funeral in 1998. Not everything they touched turned to gold; not every investment was a wise one. And in the past 10 years, their firm has stumbled, missing out on developing products like the Palm personal digital assistants or the iPod whose attributes would once have screamed “Sony.” More recently, the company was forced to make an expensive recall of laptop batteries, some of which caught fire. But Ibuka and Morita built an Asian company synonymous globally with quality and style. To all who followed — in Japan, in Southeast Asia and increasingly in China — the standard was set by two men who forged a lifelong friendship in the cruel crucible of war.