Absorbing Sogaku Seisakusho and its Gifu plant (1959)

What the plant it took on was carrying

As management decisions go, the 1959 merger is a plain one. Neither the price nor the course of the negotiation survives in the record, and the company chronology disposes of it in a single line. Even so, that line shaped the following half-century. Gaining one plant in central Japan made it possible to run a multi-plant system with a works assigned to each product, and it secured a place to mass-produce sealing materials, the company’s core line. Nor should it be overlooked that taking on a whole company, rather than building, was a way of buying the start-up time.

What was taken on, however, was not only manufacturing capacity. To own a plant that handles asbestos is to own a long obligation towards the health of the people who work in it and the people who live around it, and more than forty years passed before that weight came into view. The plant received in 1959 made sealing materials until 2003, stood in the district whose residents were briefed in 2005, and today makes resins for semiconductor equipment. The span of time one factory carried says most of what this merger was.