In 1958, a weekly magazine wrote that large companies now made more transistors than Sony, the company that had developed them. “So Sony is the guinea pig of the large companies.” One account attributes a similar jibe, casting Sony as Toshiba’s guinea pig, to the critic Ōya Sōichi in Shūkan Asahi. His own wording is not confirmed.
Sony was angry at being compared to a laboratory animal. Some years later, its founder Ibuka Masaru is reported to have said in an interview that there were still many things to create. If opening them up one by one and turning them into products was the guinea pig spirit, then the guinea pig spirit was a fine thing too. Employees gave him a golden guinea pig.