The zaibatsu dissolution and the renaming to Taisei — rebuilding as a company owned by its employees (1946)

How ending family control opened the road to a public company

The heart of this capital policy was that Taisei used an externally imposed dissolution to the full, as its chance to separate both ownership and management from the Okura family. With everyone from managing director upward purged and the founding family’s gravitational pull gone, the company did not try to preserve family control; it moved the shares to its own employees and rebuilt itself as a company owned by the people who worked in it. Taking “Okura” out of the name and putting up “construction,” a word no contractor had yet used, was equally a decision to lower the old zaibatsu banner and state plainly what kind of modern enterprise this now was.

The name itself did not stay distinctive for long: Kajima, Shimizu and Nishimatsu followed, and “construction” became the industry standard. What did last was the lead Taisei gained by finishing with family control so early — it was able to offer shares to the public and list on the Tokyo Stock Exchange ahead of the whole industry. A capital structure with no owner-manager in it was also the precondition for the collegial, “great synthesis” management that came next. That Taisei began its postwar rebuilding not from a financial crisis but from a rearrangement of who controlled it is what gives this decision its character.