Company history

Kurashiki had grown rich as a cotton-growing and trading town, and in March 1888 131 of its wealthy residents put up ¥100,000 to build a spinning mill there, with the largest landowner, Ohara Koshiro, as first president and principal shareholder. Production began in October 1889 on some 4,000 spindles. The operating policy was set from the start: hold down the cost of the plant so depreciation stays light, and pay the shareholders — a 15% dividend was declared in the second half of the first year. Keeping capital spending lean while returning cash to owners became a pattern the company would repeat for a century.

The company survived Japan’s first capitalist panic in 1890, incorporated properly in 1893, and in 1906 passed to Koshiro’s third son, Ohara Magosaburo. He expanded the cotton business — acquiring the Kibi mill, building the Masu mill in 1915 — but is remembered for what he did with the profits. Against an industry whose treatment of women workers was a national scandal, he built company housing, clinics and dispersed family-style dormitories that raised retention, founded a technical school for workers, unified the trademark and converted the spinning frames to individual motor drive. Outside the company he founded the Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki Central Hospital and the Ohara Institute for Social Research — a model in which a spinning mill’s capital circulated well beyond spinning.

The First World War brought unprecedented prosperity and the post-war reaction brought a severe slump, which Kurabo rode out on cost reduction under its motto of unity of purpose. Even then it kept expanding: in 1926 it entered the rayon business — but as a separate company, Kurashiki Kenshoku, deliberately keeping an unproven chemical fibre out of accounts already swinging with the cotton-yarn market. That company was renamed Kurashiki Rayon in 1949 and, on the strength of inventing vinylon, became Kuraray, an independent pillar of Japan’s synthetic fibre industry.

The world depression hit textile demand hard. Kurabo cut output, reduced 5–10% of its staff, cut director pay, and moved non-core work — the Kurashiki Institute for the Science of Labour among it — out of the company and into Ohara Magosaburo’s personal ownership. It was the standard move of a provincial mill in a crisis: detach what is not the business, compress payroll, restore the core. Recovery came with the cotton export boom that followed 1931, and by 1933 Japan had passed Britain to become the world’s largest exporter of cotton cloth.

Kurabo used the upswing to widen its base beyond cotton. It entered wool and staple fibre in 1936, opened the Tsu mill in Mie that March with integrated woollen spinning, weaving and dyeing, and added the Hojo mill in Ehime in 1938. Four mills across Okayama, Mie and Ehime secured its place among the ten major spinners just as the industry consolidated around large firms.

War brought controls and forced combination: Kurabo absorbed three spinning and weaving companies and two dyeing firms, giving it an integrated chain from yarn to finishing, while converting part of its capacity to munitions. It lost roughly 70% of its productive plant by the surrender. Rebuilding was immediate — listing in Tokyo in May 1949, separating machinery production into Kurashiki Machinery in August 1949, and in October 1951 opening the Anjo mill in Aichi, the largest and most modern spinning plant in the industry, which would run for more than seventy years. A New York office followed in 1955, when textile exports were Japan’s principal earner of foreign currency.

Kurabo began moving abroad and out of textiles at the same time: a Brazilian spinning subsidiary in 1957, a stake in an instant-food company in 1961, chemical products in November 1962 with urethane foam and moulded plastics, a Thai plant in 1968, environmental engineering in 1970, and electronics — colour management and production control systems — in 1976. There were no dramatic acquisitions in any of it. A plant was built, a division created, a product added, and the sequence simply continued for fourteen years.

What made it work was that the technology came from inside. Pollution-control equipment installed for its own mills became flue-gas desulphurisation systems it could sell; colour matching on its own dyeing floor became a colour management system. The pressure to do this was structural — the Nixon shock of 1971, the oil crisis of 1973, and through the decade the rising technical and cost competitiveness of Korean and Taiwanese textiles.

It was not fast enough to prevent the reckoning. Kurabo posted a net loss of about ¥1.5bn in the year to March 1975, as did other members of the ten major spinners, and in June 1983 it decided to cut 20% of its spinning capacity. The 1980s response combined that shrinkage with two long bets: fluoropolymer processing from 1986, a chemically resistant material suited to piping in semiconductor cleaning equipment, and property from 1990, turning the large sites left by closed mills into rental income. In 1993 it closed the Kurashiki mill where the company had begun 105 years earlier and leased the site to the prefecture as Tivoli Park.

Through the 2000s Kurabo rebuilt textile production around new mills at Kamogata and Tokushima, expanded chemicals into China with flexible urethane foam for car interiors in Guangzhou, closed the Tsu and Okayama mills in 2009, and in 2010 bought back Kurashiki Machinery — separated in 1949 — through a tender offer, settling into a six-segment group of textiles, chemicals, machinery, property, food and electronics.

Textiles then failed for a decade. Fujita Haruya, a descendant of the founding Ohara family, became president in 2014 promising to shift from selling material to selling value, but the segment slid from ¥90.8bn of revenue and ¥800m of profit in the year to March 2015 into an operating loss of ¥900m in FY18, ¥1.7bn in FY19 and ¥1.8bn in FY20 — squeezed simultaneously by emerging-market pricing, a shrinking domestic apparel market and rising raw material costs. A formal restructuring resolution in January 2020 closed the Marugame mill, leaving Anjo as the sole mother plant, and the segment did not return to profit until FY22.

Chemicals, meanwhile, arrived. Fluoropolymer parts for semiconductor cleaning equipment — sold largely to Tokyo Electron, supported from a Kumamoto site opened in 2018 next to the customer’s Kyushu operations — carried the segment to record levels. Nishigaki Shinji became president in June 2024 and spent his first year sorting the portfolio around that one market: Kurashiki Machinery was sold to DMG Mori (renamed DMG MORI Precision Boring), the Guangzhou urethane business was divested, and the Anjo mill — running since 1951 — was closed, ending 136 years of the company’s own spinning as a core domestic operation. About ¥3bn is going into a new building at Kumamoto to double capacity. In the year to March 2025, group revenue was ¥150.6bn with ¥10.3bn of operating profit, of which the chemicals segment contributed ¥66.0bn of revenue and ¥5.0bn of profit — roughly half the total — against textiles at ¥48.5bn and ¥70m. The diversification Ohara Magosaburo’s successors began has, in its 137th year, replaced the business it was meant to support.