Miyajima Seijiro’s serial acquisitions of rival spinners, and new large mills (1919)

Is scale something you buy, or something you build?

At the centre of this decision is a very plain question: how does a latecomer close a gap in scale? An acquisition buys time, but you take on someone else’s equipment and someone else’s shop floor exactly as they are. Building takes time, but you get a plant at your own standard. Miyajima Seijiro refused to choose, and in 1919 set the purchase of Okazaki Spinning and the construction of a 110,000-spindle Nagoya mill side by side in the same year. The bought equipment was brought up to standard by replacing machines; the built mill pushed down cost across the whole company — two instruments used to cover each other’s weakness.

The equipment stacked up this way did not survive: roughly 80% of it vanished to wartime requisition and defeat, and scale itself could not be defended. What remained was not the quantity of machinery but the way of making a business — buy competitors, build mills, keep swapping the machines. The postwar move into non-textile divisions, and later the absorption of automotive brakes and wireless communications, proceed by exactly the same hand: buy an operating business from outside and bring it to your own standard. The template for expansion that repeats a century later hardened in these years.