Industrializing vinylon on home-grown technology (1949)

Beginning while few agree

A company capitalized at $694,444 (¥250m) borrowed $3.9M (¥1bn) from fifteen banks and staked it all on one fibre. That single fact shows how far outside the conventional wisdom of the day President Ohara Soichiro’s judgement stood. It was an age when imported technology was celebrated and domestic technology counted for nothing. That he could nonetheless choose his own appears to be because he read the feedstock mix — limestone, water and electricity, and little else — as a condition no rival could copy in a country starved of foreign exchange. His maxim, begin when one or two people in ten agree, was less a brave slogan than something close to a cold calculation: by the time agreement has gathered, the business is no longer yours alone.

The object of the bet, however, was wrong. Vinylon never became a mainstay of clothing; it stayed confined to school uniforms, monpe work trousers and workwear, while the later entrants — Nippon Gosei Sen’i, Toyobo and Kanegafuchi Boseki — all dropped out of trial production. Kurashiki Rayon survived only because it had another earner, the profits of its rayon division, and could keep pouring them in. And what finally bore fruit was not the fibre but poval, the feedstock made for the fibre, which took fifty years to flower as the base material for LCD polarizing film. A decision to go with your own technology is graded over a long span of time — misses included.