City Pop was also influenced by another technological innovation: the invention, in 1979, of the Sony Walkman. The device was created because Masaru Ibuka, a former executive of Sony, wanted to be able to listen to long classical music recordings on international flights. So he asked the company to make him a portable music-listening device, which the engineers accomplished by modifying a portable tape recorder. Ibuka liked it so much that he passed it on to the company’s chairman, Akio Morita, who decided to manufacture it.
