Cutting silk to one filature and one egg station, then leaving manufacturing (1988)

Deciding how to fold before you fold

What stands out in this decision is not the speed of the withdrawal but the order in which it was made. The March 1988 resolution set out not which sites to close but what would be kept — one filature, one silkworm-egg station — and that end state then served as the measure for six years of work. Retreat from a founding business is hardest on the people involved when the end is not in sight. By placing the final shape first, the closures and suspensions that followed could be handled as steps in an agreed procedure.

That this method was available at all, however, was because the preparations for a company that could stand without silk had already been made. The pharmaceutical and machinery subsidiaries, and the rents accumulated from the shopping centres built after 1973, were ready to fill the hole the founding business would leave. Put the other way round: setting a deadline on a founding trade with no replacement earnings in place does not proceed the same way. The question of when to fold the original business has, in truth, the same shape as the question of by when the next pillar must be grown — and Katakura’s closing of a 121-year story is an example of that sequence.