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The year 1956, when transistor production began to gain momentum at
last, was also Totsuko's 10th anniversary.
Those who had been at the company's founding were surprisingly
matter-of-fact on this occasion. Ibuka and his colleagues had burned the
midnight oil to create products that would meet public needs and thus help
their company grow, and before they knew it those ten years had flown by.
Their concerted efforts had been worthwhile, for Totsuko was now far bigger
than they had ever thought possible.
Starting from practically nothing, in the midst of postwar chaos, they
had continued sailing against the wind until, by 1956, the company's capital
had grown from 190 thousand to 100 million yen and staff had multiplied
twelvefold to 483. Totsuko had also expanded from just the main Gotenyama
factory to include the Sendai plant in northern Japan.
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| The Tokyo Tushin Kogyo family of 483 employees in 1956.
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At the five-year mark, Ibuka had thought, "We've done major work on the
tape recorder, and we've come a long way." After another five years,
however, in terms of the work that lay ahead, it would be more accurate to
say they had simply reached a new starting point.
Transistors were just beginning to take off, and Totsuko's existing
product lines also promised further expansion. Tapes were a case in point.
The other tape makers in Japan at that time were TDK and Tohoku Metal
Industries. A foreign manufacturer, 3M, had its Scotch brand on the market
and NHK was using these imported tapes. Totsuko was engaged in research to
produce the kind of tape that NHK would buy.
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The H-type tape recorder, a successor to the G-type model, used the new ferrite head, giving better performance stability. The production curve continued to rise with the P-, R-, and subsequent types. The decision to move the ferrite production to Sendai was made in 1953, when tape recorder sales had begun to climb steadily. The ferrite for use in transformers had been perfected, and research on carrier ferrite was also nearing completion.
Around this time, Totsuko added a number of new models to its range of
transistor radios. The TR-81, brought out at the end of 1956, was chosen by
NHK for use by schools in remote areas. As a result, Totsuko received orders
through NHK from 200 schools all over the country. Each year NHK would
purchase radios from a specified manufacturer and donate them to outlying
schools to ensure that educational broadcasts would be received. The TR-81,
adopted under this plan as "NHK School Radio Receiver Model No. 3," was a
product that had not sold in stores and had attracted little public
attention.
Totsuko had another revolutionary product concept up its sleeve, one
that would surely capture the public's imagination. This was to be the
world's smallest transistor radio, the TR-63 pocketable radio. The
introduction was set for March 1957.
The TR-63 soon established a reputation for itself. It measured up
favorably against the Regency TR-1 model, which had beaten Totsuko's
transistor radio to become the world's first and, until the TR-63, had been
the world's smallest. Compared to the 127 7633mm dimensions of the TR-1
and its four transistors, the TR-63 measured 1127132mm and used six
transistors for better reception and output while consuming only half the
power of the TR-1.
With a selling price of 13,800 yen the TR-63 was equivalent to the
average Japanese worker's monthly salary. It was during this time that
Victor Records happened to release a record satirizing the life of the
typical businessman under the title "Thirteen Thousand Eight Hundred Yen,"
which caused quite a stir. Victor promoted this hit record by printing up
flyers to look like 10,000 yen notes and scattering them from planes. There
were some radio dealers who, unperturbed, displayed these flyers in front of
the TR-63 sets as a publicity stunt of their own.
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