| When
he visited retailers, he always left one switched on, and soon orders began flooding
in. Perhaps without knowing, he had invented Japan's
consumer society, where people bought not just necessary things, but also useful
things. As his businesses went from strength to strength,
he developed a philosophy of personal and corporate improvement. Furthermore,
he developed the idea of total embrace (marugakae) where it became impossible
to separate the life of the individual from that of the company he worked for. As
Matsushita Electrics was not one of the great family companies (zaibatsu) it was
not closed after the Second World War and he was able to rebuild and develop more
products. Under brand names such as Panasonic, National
and Technics, his products dominated the world market. Towards
the end of his life, he had seen signs that total embrace was the recent past,
not the future of Japan and warned that people were becoming too selfish and that
evil would result. However, he was famous for his
generosity and when he died in 1989, he was the richest man in Japan. | 
