Ishida Taizo takes the chair and the name reverts to Toyoda Boshoku (1967)

Restoring the name as a rescue plan

What actually worked in this rescue was neither a new business nor a capital increase, but the tidying up of a name and a balance sheet. The losses opened in an unrelated field — bowling — were closed with the credit of the old trade name Toyoda Boshoku, the sale of idle assets and the absorption of subsidiaries. What Ishida Taizo brought was not money but a sequence: secure the margin before chasing scale. That sequence echoes his remark in the same month of June 1967 rejecting the race for automobile production volume. The pattern of the group’s most senior figure entering a troubled affiliate as chairman shows clearly the reconstruction procedure the Toyota group of that era had at its disposal.

That said, the turnaround was in one respect only a stay of execution for a spinning company. By 1968, when the dividend was in prospect again, international competition in textiles was already severe, and five years later the first oil crisis would push raw material prices up. Toyoda Boshoku produced its real answer in December 1972, when it wrote automotive parts into the business purposes in its charter. The 1967 rescue was the measure that left the company with just enough strength to reach that rewriting. The name restored from “Minsei” to “Toyoda” would, thirty-seven years later, become “Toyota Boshoku.”