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Even the once miserable Japanese farmer, who traditionally sold his daughters into prostitution to tide the family over bad times, now equips his wife with gleaming appliances and works his tiny fields with a motor plow. In the big cities, housemaids, who 20 years ago lived in something approaching involuntary servitude, are now apt to carry a transistor radio tucked away in their handbags, may even be putting a few dollars a month into mutual funds.
King of Taxpayers. Japan's energetic businessmen, freed from the military domination of prewar days, have shown themselves to be among the world's most aggressive and imaginative free enterprisers. And of all the men who have helped to build Japan's prodigious industrial machine, none has worked so consistently and successfully to distribute its products among Japan's ordinary people as Seiji Hayakawa's boss — gentle, sad-eyed Konosuke Matsushita (pronounced Mat-soosh-ta), founder of giant Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.
At 67, wispy (5 ft. 4 in., 129 Ibs.) Konosuke Matsushita has the self-effacing look of an elderly, underpaid schoolteacher. In fact, he is a daring manufacturing and merchandising genius who, starting out at nine as an errand boy, has built Japan's biggest appliance business from nothing. Matsushita's success has made him Japan's biggest yen billionaire; last year his personal income hit $916,000, and for five out of six years he has been Japan's ''King of Taxpayers." But Japan's prosperity does not delight Matsushita merely because it fills his coffers. His hero is Henry Ford — the man who brought the automobile to the masses — and he believes that if the world can be filled with material abundance, men will at last be free to pursue universal peace and happiness. In making himself the Henry Ford of Japan's appliance industry, he has also made himself the most widely admired businessman in Japan.
The Lucky Man. In Japanese. Konosuke Matsushita's name means "lucky man beneath the pines," but his success owes more to pluck than luck. While he was still a child, his parents and five of his seven brothers and sisters died in rapid succession, leaving him, a frail orphan, to scratch for a living. With no family to discipline him in the rigid Japanese rules of life, which dictated that a boy must stick with his first employer for life. Matsushita at 1 6 deserted his job as apprentice bicycle repairman to join the Osaka Electric Light Co. because he saw more future in the infant electric industry. In eight years he had married and had a good position as a wiring inspector. But again he quit, scraping together $97.50 to start a tiny business making an electric socket he had designed. It failed miserably ("It was a grim year. I had to pawn my wife's kimono"), but he struggled along with subcontract work until he developed an electrical attachment plug that could be sold for 30% less than his competitors' plugs. By the time he was 27, he was a success.