Entering housing with the steel-framed unit home “Sekisui Heim” (1971)

The prototype of a diversification that turned weakness into a weapon

The heart of this decision lies in reading amateurism not as a weakness but as a weapon. Having no employee who could draw an architectural plan was a deficiency — and precisely that deficiency licensed the manufacturer’s view of a house as a factory product, and pushed the company into an industrialisation unbound by the conventions of on-site construction. The fear of a shrinking equilibrium, which a converter without feedstock of its own had tasted in the crisis of 1965, made the company accept the strain of “overtime every day,” and personnel moves made by something close to ambush poured energy into a team of amateurs. In the way a desperate, cornered throw ended up converting the weakness of the latecomer into cost competitiveness, one can see a crisis rewriting an organisation’s common sense.

That said, a market opened by amateurs does not go on widening for ever. Japan’s falling population turns the housing market down over the long term, and the room left to grow in the housing business — by then the largest pillar of profit — thins out. Now that the value offered to middle-income households in 1971, “a home you can buy for three times your annual income,” has fully matured, the company is looking for the pillar that will succeed housing in medicine, mobility and perovskite solar cells. Where does a company that opened a new market half a century ago with an amateur’s idea find its next group of amateurs, beyond a mature core business? This story of entry leaves the question open.