Company history

The recession that followed the Russo-Japanese War left Japan’s flax-spinning firms in trouble and pushed the industry toward consolidation. In July 1907, at the urging of Yasuda Zenjiro, head of the Yasuda zaibatsu, Hokkaido Seima and Nippon Seima merged to form Teikoku Seima in Tokyo, with Yasuda Zenzaburo as its first president. Because the Yasuda-affiliated Nippon Seima was the centre of the merger, a convention took hold that would outlast the zaibatsu itself: the presidency was filled by men sent from the group’s bank, later the Fuji Bank.

The company was built to replace imported linen with a domestic product, and its geography followed the material. Flax was grown in Hokkaido and processed at the Sapporo works; the labour-intensive spinning and weaving ran at Kanuma in Tochigi, within reach of the capital and its supply of women workers. Raw material through to finished cloth sat inside one company.

Growth after that came almost entirely by absorbing rivals — Nippon Asaito in 1923, Showa Seima in 1928, and in August 1941 Taiyo Rayon, on which occasion the name changed to Teikoku Sen-i, widening the company from hemp alone to textiles in general. Three more firms were taken in a single 1942 merger, Taiwan Seima followed in 1944, and the textile division of Nippon Oil & Fats in 1945. Eleven competitors in twenty-two years made Teikoku Sen-i the pivot of the industry’s wartime consolidation.

Designated a zaibatsu company after the war, Teikoku Sen-i was dissolved in July 1950 under the Excessive Concentration of Economic Power Elimination Law and the enterprise reconstruction statutes, and three companies were created in its place: Chuo Sen-i, Teikoku Seima and Toho Rayon. The flax business went to Teikoku Seima, the rest to the other two, and the capital ties between them were cut. In September 1950 Chuo Sen-i and Teikoku Seima both listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

Both invested in flax anyway, building the Iwata works in Shizuoka and a flax plant at Nakashibetsu in Hokkaido. What defeated them was not each other but synthetic fibre, which was taking the demand for linen away structurally rather than cyclically. In November 1959 they gave up competing and recombined: Chuo Sen-i absorbed Teikoku Seima and took back the name Teikoku Sen-i.

By 1960 the reassembled company employed 5,000 people, and in October 1961 it was designated to the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Less than a decade after the dissolution, the substance of the old Teikoku Sen-i — and its character as a Yasuda-line flax spinner run by bankers — was back in one place.

The Nixon shock of 1971 and the oil crisis of 1973 hit a company still spinning flax. A stronger yen and the continuing shift to synthetics stripped the textile business of its competitiveness, and in 1975 Teikoku Sen-i fell to an ordinary loss. None of its three main plants — Kanuma, Iwata and Ogaki — could be justified on its own; in 1977 the company cut 480 jobs and began the first serious restructuring of its postwar history.

The escape routes were tried one at a time. In 1978 it entered menswear retail through Teisen Apparel and, more consequentially, began supplying uniforms to the Air Self-Defense Force — its first foothold in public-sector demand. The Iwata plant was sold to Yamaha Motor in 1980 and the site leased out as a shopping centre in 1981, the same trick other textile firms were turning on their redundant land. In 1982 it began selling heat-resistant clothing and opened a product category it called disaster-response. A dividend was restored in December 1984, the first in seven periods.

Then came the build-out. A fire-vehicle plant opened in 1990, adding chemical fire engines and rescue vehicles to a hose business the company had run for decades; a hose-lining plant followed at Kanuma in 1992, and in 1994 Teikoku Sen-i delivered large chemical fire engines to the new Kansai International Airport. In 1995 Iida Tokiaki, from the Fuji Bank, became president and stayed seventeen years, shrinking textiles and selling plant sites while concentrating investment on fire safety. The reversal shows in the first segment disclosures: in the year to December 2005, disaster-response produced sales of $98M (¥11bn) and profit of $15M (¥2bn) against textiles’ $81.7M (¥9bn) and $6.3M (¥690m). Ninety-eight years after its founding, hemp was no longer the business.

The earthquake of 11 March 2011 and the accident at Fukushima Daiichi turned Teikoku Sen-i’s specialism into national infrastructure — its hoses were used to pump water to the crippled plant, the Hyper Rescue units injecting through them. Demand for rescue vehicles, chemical fire engines and pump trucks for nuclear stations rose for years afterwards: disaster-response sales went from $186M (¥17bn) in 2009 to $260.8M (¥28bn) in 2014, with segment profit up roughly 2.7-fold, and consolidated net profit reached a record $48.8M (¥5bn).

Reconstruction demand then stopped as abruptly as it had come. Consolidated operating profit fell from $77.5M (¥8bn) in 2014 to $30.3M (¥3bn) in 2016 and sales by about 28%, exposing how much of the profit had been one-off. The company spent the following decade re-basing the business on peacetime buyers — the Self-Defense Forces, the Fire and Disaster Management Agency, municipalities, the power utilities — and on capacity: land bought from Maeda Seika for $15.9M (¥2bn) in 2020 became the Shimotsuke works in 2021, its first new plant since the war, letting Kanuma specialise in hose while Shimotsuke built vehicles.

Building plant, however, is not what the register wanted. Sparx Asset Management, holding about 6%, proposed a higher dividend and shorter director terms in 2018; the British fund AVI followed in 2020, pointing out that a 3.56% stake in Hulic had swollen to 32% of Teikoku Sen-i’s total assets; Nippon Active Value Fund demanded a $43.4M (¥7bn) buyback and a majority-independent board in 2025. The board opposed all of them, and all were voted down — but never by a comfortable margin. The answer took the form of plans: a ten-year “Teisen Future Creation” programme in 2023, an explicit capital-cost statement in 2024 acknowledging that price-to-book had fallen from 1.72 in 2014 to 0.82, and in April 2026 a new plan, Teisen 2028, which conceded that the 8% ROE target had been missed at 5.4%, resegmented disaster-response into water transfer, security and firefighting, shifted growth from in-house capex toward M&A and alliances, and raised the total payout target to 50%. Sales for 2025 were $224.5M (¥34bn). What began in 1907 as a hemp spinner now earns four-fifths of its revenue from disaster response, with linen kept on as the second wheel.