The three-way merger that made Hisamitsu a joint-stock company (1951)

Becoming a corporation, forging shop and all

What the February 1951 merger replaced was not the medicine sold but the registration of the company selling it. Of the three entities bundled together, Tashiro Koki Kogyo handled mining machinery and forgings and had nothing to do with either Asahi Mankinko or Salonpas. Miyaki Pharmaceutical, too, had been set up in May 1944 only to hive off drug manufacturing under wartime controls. Three mismatched companies were wound together in order to convert an unlimited partnership — the form the business had held since December 1903 — into a joint-stock company. Hisamitsu Brothers Co., Ltd., with Nakatomi Masayoshi as president, acquired that day the right to issue shares and raise money from outside.

The right to issue shares, however, was the same thing as the duty to keep explaining results and intentions to outsiders. Eleven years passed between acquiring the right and using it; from the September 1962 listing on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and the Fukuoka exchange, Hisamitsu has stood on the explaining side every period since. The name changed from the Komatsuya opened at Tashiro in 1847, but the head office never left Tashiro in Tosu, and the Nakatomi family kept running it. And in 2026 the company decided to go private, citing investment abroad. Both the right to issue shares and the duty to keep explaining were given up together, seventy-five years on.