Absorbing Toyo Seiki, successor to the first Tsugami (1961)

Recovering a lineage, and holding on to a plant

The 1961 merger carried two meanings at once: a provision for higher output, and the recovery of a corporate lineage that had been given away. The first showed up in the numbers as a three-plant structure; the second survived, after the later tidying of company names, as the single line of descent that runs to today’s Tsugami. The two were not, however, of equal weight. Taking back the old company may have been a singular event for the founder, but to the company the Ibaraki plant was a third site far from Nagaoka with a workforce of 150 — no more than that.

That showed in how it was treated when trouble came. The manager brought in from outside in 1975 closed and sold Ibaraki without regard to its provenance and turned the financial improvement toward concentrating on automatic lathes. What the founder had taken twenty-five years to reclaim, the next generation let go of in fourteen. And yet without that decision the flagship product of 1978 would most likely never have existed. What to reclaim and where to let go — Tsugami’s lineage can be read as a case in which those two decisions landed on the same asset.