The Men Who Bought Japan: How Nakamichi, Akai and Sansui All Died in the Same Hands

In 1999 a single holding company in Hong Kong came to own Nakamichi, Akai and Sansui — three of the greatest names in the history of recorded sound — and within eighteen months it stood at the centre of the largest corporate insolvency the city had ever seen. This is how they actually died, and it was not the compact disc. Nakamichi spent forty years learning to hold a mechanical tolerance nobody else on earth could hold, and then digital audio moved the hard problems into silicon and made the skill worthless. Akai left the audio business in 1991 and spent nine more years as a name on somebody else's balance sheet, until two point three billion dollars in declared assets turned out to be a hundred and sixty-seven thousand. And Sansui — sixty years old, founded in a Tokyo that was burning — was sold to three foreign owners in a row, and all three collapsed. Asil Nadir and Polly Peck. James Ting, who arrived at a marketing meeting in Rome in a chariot. Christopher Ho, Ernst & Young, and fifty-four cardboard boxes of records that Akai's creditors were never supposed to see. The men are named. Most of them are still working.