Founding Taisei: from Okura Kihachiro’s trading house to the industry’s first “construction” name (1873)

What a founding in two layers arrived at

What this founding shows is how strongly the form of a company was dictated by the institutions around it. The civil-engineering arm that began as Okura Kihachiro’s personal trading house was incorporated in 1887 as public works expanded, pushed back into personal ownership in 1892 when the Accounting Law moved government contracts to competitive tender, and only re-established as an independent joint-stock company in 1917. A founding that travelled twice between company and individual suggests that the rules of public procurement — the shift from negotiated contracts to open bidding — were shaping the very shape of a construction firm.

The other thing that comes into view is that Taisei took the postwar dissolution of the zaibatsu as a double transition. Clearing the Okura family’s hold from the capital and raising “construction” over the door as the name of a modern industry proceeded together between 1946 and 1949. A renaming that took “Taisei” from the founder’s posthumous name and loaded it with the sense of building a company collectively marks the point at which a business born of one man’s commercial talent set out again with its management cut loose from any single house.