Company history

In July 1979 Ukigawa Kazunori quit the marine electrical maker where he had spent six years — “a salaryman can’t support a family” — and started a business in Tokushima with his wife Hatsuko, in an office converted from her family’s sitting room. They began as a dealer for Toshiba office computers, chosen specifically because Toshiba’s kanji handling was the most advanced available. The premise was already the company’s whole strategy: when every Japanese person eventually uses a computer, the thing that will matter is Japanese, and above all kanji. Two founders in a provincial city, in an industry that lived in Tokyo and Osaka, was an unusual starting point. They incorporated in June 1981.

Early revenue came from business software for narrow trades — feed-formulation management for dairy farmers, a sales system for greenhouse film, which Hatsuko specified so thoroughly by listening to the customer that it needed no revision for seven years and made the firm’s local reputation. The 1983 word processor that preceded Ichitaro was released under ASCII’s brand, because ASCII held the trademark, and the staff took it badly. But in October 1982 the company had already announced KTIS, the kana-kanji conversion system that became ATOK — “Advanced Technology Of Kana-kanji transfer” — turning romaji and kana keystrokes into mixed kanji text at a genuinely usable standard. It was the hard, specifically Japanese problem that Western word processors did not have to solve, and it made a small Tokushima developer technically conspicuous.

In August 1985 Ichitaro shipped with ATOK inside it, and took the leading share of Japan’s PC word-processor market — government offices, schools, ordinary companies — a position it held until Microsoft Office arrived in earnest in the late 1990s. Revenue went from ¥900m in the year to April 1986 to a projected ¥9.7bn five years later, and headcount from 28 to about 500. It was not smooth: the fourth version slipped twice, then shipped with a defect that forced a recall of 160,000 copies. Ukigawa took the blame publicly as his own misjudgement of the release date, and the honesty, plus the ambition of the revision itself, ended up raising Ichitaro’s standing rather than damaging it. Sales offices followed in Osaka, Tokyo and Nagoya while development stayed in Tokushima.

In June 1997 JustSystems completed a $86.8M (¥11bn) head office in Tokushima, and in October it listed on JASDAQ after nearly six years of preparation. The two events were connected in a way that proved fatal: bank borrowings had gone from ¥3.1bn to ¥11.1bn in a single year to fund the building, and the repayment plan rested on the listing plus the September launch of Ichitaro Office 8, an office suite built to meet Microsoft head-on. The listing raised only ¥7.5bn at a book-built opening price of ¥2,500, most of which went straight to debt. Office 8 was planned at 1.8 million copies and ¥17.0bn; it sold 800,000 and ¥7.4bn.

The year to March 1998 produced the first loss in the company’s history — revenue of ¥24.0bn against a ¥36.4bn forecast, and a ¥4.5bn loss where ¥3.0bn of profit had been expected. Ukigawa’s own verdict was that “the wish to beat Microsoft, our greatest rival, grew too strong,” and that in fighting a campaign explicitly aimed at killing Ichitaro he had lost sight of what made Ichitaro good. The company cut headcount from 1,700, contractors included, to around 1,000 and stripped ¥7.5bn of costs. In January 1998 Ukigawa went to see Sony’s Idei Nobuyuki personally and came away with $9.7M (¥1bn), making Sony the fourth-largest shareholder at 6.7% — a stake small enough that independence survived.

The market went anyway. Ichitaro peaked at 3.94 million copies in fiscal 1996; PC bundling deals fell from 1.4 million units to zero, and losses ran three years straight. The company hunted for replacements — an internet access business spun out in 2000, the ConceptBase natural-language search product that had been conceived nearly twenty years earlier and only shipped in late 1997 (“the stronger Ichitaro was, the harder it was to germinate the next business,” Ukigawa said), the Just MyShop direct e-commerce site in 2001, online storage in 2003, and the XMetaL XML editing business bought from Canada in 2006. One of these mattered more than it looked: Ichitaro Smile, a word processor for primary-school children released in June 1999, put the company inside the classroom.

In April 2009, facing another loss and without the cash to rebuild alone, JustSystems allotted $48.1M (¥5bn) of new shares to Keyence, which became the largest shareholder with about 44% and the majority of the board. The Ukigawas left that year — the sticking point was not the shareholding but the basic-research team, which Kazunori would not release — and Fukura Tomoaki, then a managing director, became president. Thirty years in, the company left the founding family’s hands, and Keyence alumni, including Sekinada Kyotaro, took over the running of it.

What the new management did was change what the company sold. In December 2012 it launched Smile Zemi, a correspondence-learning service delivered on a dedicated tablet, extended to middle-school students the next year. The move worked because the foundation already existed: after thirteen years of making the learning software used in roughly 80% of Japan’s public primary schools, the company knew how children handle a screen. What it lacked was a customer — the household — and a way to bill every month, and building its own tablet rather than shipping an app on a general-purpose one solved both at once. Tokyo became a second head office in 2013, and in February 2014 the shares moved from JASDAQ to the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

The result is a company whose contents have been swapped out while nothing on the outside moved. In the year to March 2025 operating profit was ¥18.0bn on a margin above 30%, earned not by Ichitaro or ATOK — both of which still exist — but by subscription education. In May 2025 Smile Zemi opened in the United States at kindergarten level, the first serious overseas service in the company’s history and the first real test of whether a system built for Japanese households transfers to a different language and school system. Forty-six years after two people started selling office computers in Tokushima, the name, the listing and the head office are the same, and the product is not.