Consolidating production in Nagaoka (1976)

What turned an accidental location into a home base

For a company that builds all of its own processing machinery, a plant is not only where the product is made but where the machines that make the product are made. When Katayama Ichiro moved the head-office plant’s production functions to Nagaoka in 1979, it appears he judged that unless design, machine building and volume production stood on a single site, the policy of making things in-house could not be sustained. A parts-only plant started with about fifty people was promoted, in under three years, into the receiver of the head-office plant.

The reason Nagaoka was chosen, however, was not a calculation about location but the accident of having taken over an acquaintance’s failing shipbuilding-related company. It took nearly half a century for that plant to grow into a mainstay of more than 550 people, and over that span the judgement to keep building — the second through fifth plants, and the three at Mitsuke — was made again and again. What turned land acquired by chance into a home base was not the first move itself but the later choices to keep investing in it.