Sony was founded in 1946 and their first product for consumers was a rice cooking machine. From that, they started to grow and built their first transistor factory in Gotenyama where they created their first portable radios.
Sony portable radio TR-63 in 1957.
A shop selling Sony products in the 60s.
Sony was growing very fast, they needed to find a new localization for their next factory. They decided to built it in Astugi, a little rural village near Yokohama. I lived in Atsugi next to that factory during 2005, it was fun to see masses of Sony employees moving around in the morning and afternoon. The Atsugi factory was the biggest semiconductor factory in the world, it was even bigger that the ones that Texas Instruments had in the US.
Sony factory in 1960.
I took this picture in 2005, this is how the factory looks like nowadays.
Thanks to this Sony factory, Atsugi became a big city and many big companies decided to place there R&D centers and factories there. For example Nissan, Ricoh, Ntt, Canon or Asahi Kasei have research centers in Atsugi. I worked for Asahi Kasei, building speech recognition systems for car navy devices.
This is a picture I took from my work place in Atsugi. You can see factories and rice fields mixed with factories and Mount Fuji at the horizon.
This is another picture showing Atsugi’s south-east area.
This is a video taken near the Atsugi’s Sony factory entrance.
Main entrance
Sony from a garden near the factory.
Sony people lives in those sad buildings, it’s a Sony dormitory.
Grocery shop next to the Sony factory.
Ibuka and Morita, the Sony founders as seen in the “History of Sony” website.
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