The founding of Kajima: from an Edo master carpenter to “Kajima of the railways” (1840)

Two foundings — a craftsman’s trade, and the year it became a company

What Kajima’s history shows is a company laid down in two strata ninety years apart: an origin as one master carpenter’s family trade in the Edo period, and a start as a modern enterprise with the incorporation of 1930. The business Kajima Iwakichi opened at Kyobashi in 1840 was neither a corporation nor a creature of the capital markets but a craftsman taking work directly — daimyo residences and townhouses. The technique for large-scale building and the client relationships accumulated over that long stretch as an individual master carpenter appear to be what supplied the people and the skills for the later move into Western architecture in Yokohama and into railway civil engineering.

The other thing that comes into view is how often this company has deliberately wound up a proven line of business to move to the next one. The second-generation Iwazo dissolved the Western-architecture firm Kajima-kata and moved to the railway specialist Kajima Gumi; the third-generation Seiichi converted a sole proprietorship into a joint-stock company; Kajima Morinosuke widened a railway specialist into a general contractor. Each reads as the same choice — refusing to settle into an existing strength and recomposing the business around it. The first hundred-odd years, in which a single carpenter of Edo Kyobashi turned into a modern general contractor, became the ground on which the later record of in-house technology and diversification stands.