Company history

Celluloid suited Japan: the raw materials were at hand, and the finished goods sold abroad. Two makers were set up in 1908 — Sakai Celluloid and Nippon Celluloid Artificial Silk, the ancestors of the Sakai and Aboshi works — and when the European war of 1914 turned celluloid into a boom export, six more followed. The result was a trade of small firms undercutting one another at home while none of them was large enough to face foreign rivals. In September 1919 the eight combined into Dainippon Celluloid with capital of ¥12.5 million. No one founded this company; an overcrowded industry consolidated itself, and the merger was the point.

Being a composite from birth meant never depending on one product. The nitrocellulose chemistry behind celluloid was pushed outward instead: Lactoid and phenolic resins from 1929, which made Daicel one of the pioneers of Japan’s plastics industry; cellophane at the Kanzaki works in 1932, taking it into packaging; organic synthesis at the Arai works in 1935. The most consequential branch left the company altogether. In January 1934 the photographic film division was separated as Fuji Photo Film — today’s Fujifilm — so that one of the largest chemical groups in the world traces its origin to a Daicel film-base line.

The founding decade was not comfortable. The merger landed in a slump and capital was written down to ¥10 million in 1922; the war ended with the plants heavily damaged by bombing. What survived intact was the chemistry.

Reconstruction ran through acetate fibre, commercialized from 1948, and in May 1949 the company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange as the market reopened. Cellulose acetate production began at the Aboshi works in 1951. Then, in January 1954, the new Harima works started making propellants — a small ordnance line whose combustion-control know-how would sit dormant for thirty-four years before it became the largest business in the group.

The rest of the period was a widening of the base away from celluloid. Dainippon Plastics was set up in 1956; acetate tow — the fibre inside cigarette filters, and still one of the group’s steadiest earners — began at the Sakai works in 1958. In 1961 Dainippon Kasei carried the company into petroleum-based organic synthesis, and in 1964 a joint venture with America’s Celanese created Polyplastics, whose Duracon polyacetal put Daicel into engineering plastics.

By the mid-1960s the shape of the modern company was visible: cellulose chemistry inherited from celluloid, petrochemical organic synthesis bought in from abroad, and a propellant line waiting for a use.

The nickname became the name: Dainippon Celluloid was renamed Daicel in 1966, and in 1979 Daicel Chemical Industries, a title that said plainly it was no longer a celluloid firm. Dainippon Kasei was absorbed in 1968, bringing the Ohtake petrochemical works in-house, and a 1970 venture with Germany’s Huels added nylon 12. From 1984 the company built its own overseas arms — Daicel (U.S.A.) and Daicel (Europa) — while Polyplastics moved engineering plastics into Taiwan in 1988.

The decisive move came in October 1988, when Daicel Safety Systems began making airbag inflators. The device is a controlled explosion: gas generated in milliseconds to fill a bag, which is exactly the problem the Harima propellant line had been solving since 1954. A military technology, converted to civilian demand generated by someone else’s product, put Daicel inside the supply chains of the world’s carmakers.

A second, quieter conversion ran in parallel. In 1990 Chiral Technologies was set up in the United States to sell chiral separation columns — cellulose-derived packings that separate optical isomers, indispensable to drug development — with a European arm following in 1995. Acetate tow went to Xi’an in 1992; PBT resin arrived through WinTech Polymer with Teijin in 2000. By the turn of the century the four axes the company still runs on — cellulose, organic synthesis, inflators and healthcare — were all in place.

Inflators are not shipped far, so the 2000s were spent building them where cars are built: a US venture with Toyoda Gosei in 2000, Thailand in 2002, Poland in 2004, Jiangsu in China later the same year. A business that began as a spare use for gunpowder ended up embedded in the global assembly network, and through the 2010s it carried the group’s earnings while the older cellulose lines and the newer organic-synthesis and healthcare businesses steadied them.

The management problem then moved inside the fence. Under Ogawa Yoshimi, president from 2018 and an engineer from the production side, the Daicel production innovation developed at Aboshi was rolled out across the group: the intuition of veteran operators written out as hundreds of thousands of cases and pulled onto a single control screen, with IoT and AI optimizing the running of plants that had been steered by feel. In the same period Daicel bought out Celanese’s stake to make Polyplastics a wholly owned subsidiary, ending fifty-six years of joint control and consolidating the resin business under its own strategy, all inside the medium-term plan Accelerate 2025.

Sakaki Yasuhiro, an organic-synthesis researcher, took over in June 2024, keeping the production programme but pushing profit accountability down into strategic business units and concentrating R&D spending where the company is genuinely strong. The line of presidents — procurement, then production engineering, then research — reads as a list of the problems each decade thought most urgent. A hundred and six years on, the same two roots are still visible: cellulose, which became acetate, tow and display film, and propellant, which became the airbag.