Winston Churchill called it “the most daring and courageous act of the entire war”. On August 30 1945, General Douglas MacArthur landed in Atsugi, south-west of Tokyo. He wore aviator sunglasses, a corncob pipe dangled from his lips, and he was unarmed. A man of war was arriving to make peace.
Over the next six years of allied occupation, MacArthur would demilitarise Japan, enfranchise women, oversee the writing of a new constitution and decree democracy. But first, he faced a more prosaic problem: Japan’s communications industry was in such shambles that he could barely issue commands.
Solving this challenge turned out to have enormous consequences, not only reshaping Japan in the 1940s but upending global manufacturing in the 1980s and, by the 2000s, revolutionising the way products would be built at Apple, a company that did not exist at the time.