Company history

Katakura began in 1873, when the twenty-four-year-old Katakura Kentaro I set up a ten-reel hand-reeling shop in Kawagishi village, Suwa, in Nagano. The timing was deliberate: the Meiji government had opened its model mill at Tomioka only the year before, making the mechanised mass production of raw silk a matter of national policy. Katakura entered the same industrialisation from the private side, in a province whose climate suited mulberry and whose farmers already kept silkworms — the cocoons could simply be bought in.

The market, however, was abroad. Raw silk was a luxury with a small domestic appetite, and almost all of it went to the United States, where it was consumed in volume as the yarn for women’s stockings; dollar receipts, not Japanese demand, were what funded the company. On that trade Katakura built mills across the country through the Meiji period — Matsumoto, Omiya, Koriyama, Takahata, Ichinomiya, Himeji, Tosu, Oita — and by the Taisho years was running twenty-nine of them. Every one of those sites was bought as a factory. A century later most of them would matter for something else entirely.

In March 1920 the business was incorporated as Katakura Silk Spinning with capital of ¥50 million and a head office in Kyobashi, Tokyo. It was immediately one of the two great names in the trade, alongside Gunze, and it grew by buying up smaller reelers. The symbolic acquisition came in September 1939, when Katakura absorbed the former government mill at Tomioka — the state had launched the industry, and a private company now inherited its monument. At its height in 1932 the firm employed 38,000 people across 62 mills; the family was called the silk kings of the world, and the group the “Katakura kingdom.”

The company also began, quietly, to hold things other than filatures. In October 1943 it founded Toa Eiyo, a wartime nutrition-chemicals venture that later became its pharmaceutical core, and the following month changed its own name to Katakura Industries — dropping “silk” from the title long before it dropped silk. It added the Omiya works in 1946 and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in May 1949.

Then the trade itself disappeared. Through the 1950s nylon displaced silk as the material of women’s stockings; Toray built its fortune on the substitution, and Katakura absorbed it as a direct hit on its only real business. It lost money and paid no dividend in both 1954 and 1955. Moves downstream — a hosiery company in 1954, knitted underwear from 1960 — were never large enough to matter. Mill closures began in 1958, and a 1961 push into the synthetic fibre vinylon could not follow the capital spending of Toray and Teijin. In December 1969, ninety-six years after its founding, Katakura suspended its dividend altogether.

What Katakura still had, after the dividend stopped, was land — some 330,000 tsubo of mill sites acquired when they were on the edge of provincial towns and now, in many cases, sitting in the middle of them. In 1972 a group of Hong Kong investors built a stake of around 10 per cent on exactly that arithmetic, treating Katakura as an asset stock priced below what it owned. The pressure did not reveal anything the company did not know; it forced it to act on what it knew.

The property business proper opened in March 1973 with a shopping plaza at Toride, and the model was fixed from there: redevelop a dead filature site into retail and collect rent, rather than sell the land once. Matsumoto Katakura Mall followed in 1981, Omiya Katakura Park — the seed of Cocoon City — in 1983. The silk side was wound down in the opposite order: a March 1988 decision fixed the end state at one filature (Kumagaya) and one silkworm-egg station (Numazu), reeling stopped in 1992, and both were idled in 1994. Katakura left the manufacture of silk 121 years after it had begun it.

Around the property income the company assembled the remainder of itself from subsidiaries founded decades earlier for other reasons: Toa Eiyo, by then a specialist in cardiovascular prescription drugs; Katakura Kiki in machinery; Nichibi in fibres. The 2004 Katakura Shintoshin Mall, minutes from the new Saitama-Shintoshin station, became the centre of the property arm — and was named “Cocoon,” after the raw material of a business the group no longer had. In 2005 it gave the Tomioka mill buildings to the city of Tomioka and sold the land the following year, ending sixty-six years of ownership; the site was inscribed as a World Heritage property in 2014. By fiscal 2007, of consolidated sales of $422M (¥50bn), pharmaceuticals were the largest segment and textiles the smallest.

In March 2013 Tokyo Square Garden was completed on the site of the old Kyobashi head office, a high-rise office complex connected directly to the subway. The plot was the third use of the same land: head office of a silk company from 1920, then part of the estate that survived the silk business, then prime central-Tokyo rent. In 2015 the Omiya sites were consolidated as Cocoon City with the opening of Cocoon 2 and 3, and a further centre followed at Fukushima in 2021.

In March 2019 Joko Ryosuke, who had come from Mizuho Financial Group, became president, with the previous president Sano Kimiya moving up to chairman — an outside financial brain placed over an asset-heavy balance sheet. What followed was the tidying-up that the four-pillar structure had postponed. A hundred voluntary redundancies were taken in 2020; the 2017 medium-term plan was abandoned outright and replaced by restructuring — apparel transferred to the subsidiary Ogland Japan, the machinery-electronics business exited, the pharmaceutical model rebuilt so that Toa Eiyo’s cardiovascular drugs were sold in-house from 2022. In June 2023 knitted underwear, begun in 1960, left the parent company as well.

The rebuilt group buys rather than starts: Tokin Shiko in 2023, FPG Technology in 2023 (now Katakura Cross-Technology), Sanzen in 2024. Fiscal 2024 closed with sales of ¥39.4bn, a 10.4% operating margin, interest-bearing debt down to ¥7.8bn and equity of ¥86.0bn — a company whose balance sheet is more than twice its revenue. Joko’s answer to that was distribution rather than accumulation: cross-shareholdings sold down, a $9.2M (¥1bn) buyback in 2024, and a year-end dividend raised to ¥60. By fiscal 2025 the four segments — property, pharmaceuticals, machinery, textiles — each fell within a band of roughly ¥6.8bn to ¥11.7bn in sales. The company that in 1932 ran a kingdom on one product now runs four businesses of almost equal size, none of them the one it was founded for. Its 2022 choice of the TSE Standard market over Prime was of a piece with that: finish the restructuring first.