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> Canon Camera's Takeshi Mitarai, 60, who, by stressing quality and workmanship, emerged as one of the world's leading camera manufacturers and exporters.
> Soichiro Honda, 55 (TIME, Aug. 25), a former auto mechanic whose precision-built Honda motorcycle has won world fame as the hottest thing on two wheels.
The Bottom. Of all Japan's industrial titans, none has brought his company so far and so fast since the war as Matsushita. Matsushita came out of the war with worn-out machinery—miraculously, the B-29s had failed to hit any of his plants—and exhausted, frightened workers. He was so badly in debt that for a time the future King of Taxpayers was billed as the King of Tax Delinquents.
American occupation authorities lumped him with the zaibatsu, who were scheduled to be obliterated from the industrial scene.
"It was the bottom, the low point, the toughest period of my career," he says.
Salvation came from an unexpected quarter: the labor union whose formation U.S. officials encouraged as a measure to introduce democracy to Japan's industry. Time after time, delegations of Matsushita workers trooped to Tokyo to tell the occupation authorities that their boss was a non-zaibatsti poor boy, a benevolent employer, whose aim was a better life for the masses. After three years of appeals, Matsushita's name was finally taken off the purge list and his company spared the enforced "deconcentration" that hit other giant firms. Still, the hard times forced him to lop off 30 subsidiaries and reduce his staff to 3,800. Says he: "I never felt so sad about anything in my life." The New Freedom. Once he could operate freely in a civilian economy, however, Matsushita was in his element. He pioneered easy-payment plans, became Japan's biggest advertiser (his ad budget last year: $18 million), flooded his dealers with sales aids. His domain swelled to 89 plants, employing 49,000 workers. From $17 million in 1951, Matsushita's sales made an astounding leap to $486 million last year, and in five more years he expects them to pass the billion dollar mark.
Unlike most U.S. electrical-equipment makers, he does a scant 1% of his business with the military.
To his prewar product line, Matsushita has added a staggering array of new products including television sets, tape recorders, hearing aids, mechanical massagers, electric pencil sharpeners and electrically heated trousers; now he is developing a home freezer and a line of computers.
Sold under the brand name "National" (except in the U.S., where, because of a trademark conflict, they carry the name "Panasonic"), Matsushita's products have done much to change Japanese life. His rice cooker, which automatically turns out a perfect batch of rice every time, has freed Japanese women from the need to get up an hour earlier than their husbands — and from the terrible mother-in-law's verdict, "She can't even cook rice," which once was enough to send a Japanese bride back to her parents in disgrace. Matsushita's vacuum-cleaner ad that promises women "freedom from one phase of household drudgery," introduces a notion that, though old hat in the West, marks a revolution in the status of Japanese women.