Founding Toyo Rubber Industry by merging Toyo Rubber Kako and Hirano Gomu Seizosho (1945)

A company begun by pooling burnt-out plant

Two companies holding burnt-out plant did not choose the time it would take to rebuild separately. That is where the character of this merger shows. By 1944 Toyo Boseki had already put its Nishinari works in as an in-kind investment and was inside the capital of Hirano Gomu Seizosho; the merger of August 1945 was in part the tidying of a relationship that already existed into the form of a single company. The speed of the switch — changing the trade name just before the surrender, starting footwear production the following year — appears to have rested on the fact that the equipment and the people were still standing in the same place.

What this starting point left behind, though, was not only agility. Born as a company engaged in rubber manufacture at large, it carried tyres, footwear and chemical products together for a long time, and it took seventy-four years before it could call itself a tyre maker. The breadth of product lines the merger brought worked as a strength in the reconstruction years, when equipment could be turned toward whatever was in demand; once the automobile became the main act, it remained as a difficulty in taking aim.