Sony Hawaii was established in 1968 by then Sony Corporation president Akio Morita, who sent Kenji Tamiya to become Sony Hawaii’s first president. Today, Sony Hawaii is led by its eighth president, Naobumi “Ned” Nomura. It handles sales for Hawaii, Guam, Saipan, Palau and other selected Pacific regions as well as global U.S. military sales. Sony currently employs 73 people in Hawaii, but that number is to drop by more than half as they trimming staff from its Honolulu offices in Mapunapuna, with more to come in the next few months as part of an overall corporate restructuring effort.
Seventeen employees took voluntary early retirement deals, effective in June, according to John Dolak, spokesman for Sony. Fourteen more positions will be cut between June 5 and July 1, for a total of 31.
When Sony first came to town in 1968, Hawaii was a different place. Color television was still a relatively new medium. Baseball was America’s #1 sport, and you could watch the Hawaii Islanders play in the old Honolulu Stadium on Isenberg Street. It cost 20 cents to catch a bus ride on the Honolulu Rapid Transit. A pound of freshly cooked char siu pork set you back 50 cents in Chinatown, and you ate guilt-free because cholesterol was a relatively unknown medical term.
At the time, Sony’s business in Hawaii was being conducted through a dealership, which in turn was handled by SONAM’s office in Los Angeles. In May 1968, Tamiya landed alone at Honolulu Airport with $50,000 in operation funds – a large responsibility considering Mr. Kenji Tamiya had been with Sony for about one year. Sent from Tokyo headquarters by President Akio Morita, he set up shop together with a few employees on the third floor of City Bank in downtown Honolulu. The $50,000 was spent quickly, and Tamiya began to use his salary to pay utility bills and employees’ salaries for the first two or three months. The products had not yet arrived, so money was spent while none was coming in.
Products finally arrived in August. Sony Hawaii had already established agreements with a number of dealers, and once the products were distributed, revenues began to come in. At the time, products meant only transistor radios. Sony Hawaii could not sell tape recorders due to an exclusive dealership agreement Sony had with Super Scope, which covered the U.S. mainland and Hawaii, and color television sets were not yet available. The first order Sony Hawaii received was for two radios and two stereos.
