Organo - Company History

A restart from Yamanashi Kagaku Kogyo, and the founding ion-exchange resin business

Research into ion-exchange resin was suspended when the war ended, but Maruyama Masatake (丸山正武), who had been chief researcher in the pharmaceutical department of the Army Medical College, was convinced of its future[1]. He bought up the stock of Diaion ion-exchange resin held at Mitsubishi Chemical Industries’ Kurosaki works, resumed his research in October 1945, and by February 1946 had completed a demineralising unit producing 40 litres of desalted water an hour[2]. To manufacture it in quantity and put it into general use, he acquired Yamanashi Kagaku Kogyo — a company established in July 1941 that had pursued applied research into ion-exchange resin during the war[3] — and on 1 May 1946, with capital of ¥50,000 and Maruyama Masatake as president, Nihon Organo Shokai was founded at Suwa in Nagano prefecture[4]. It was the first company in Japan to take ion-exchange equipment as its principal line of business, and the name came from the term then used for ion-exchange resin: organic zeolite, shortened to organolite[5].

At the outset the firm rented a corner of a shop in Kami-Suwa — the town known for the Onbashira festival — and behind it made sterile distilled water and injectable pharmaceuticals and assembled and machined equipment, a tiny operation in every sense[6]. Amid the extreme shortages of the immediate post-war years, President Maruyama and every one of his directors packed resin cylinders into rucksacks, boarded overcrowded trains and went round Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya to sell and to collect payment — an era of everyone in sales, everyone in manufacturing, everyone in accounts. Even so the business grew steeply: against the 1946 base, turnover was three times higher in 1947 and forty times higher by 1951[7], catching the reconstruction-era demand as industrial uses of ion-exchange resin — pure water production, pharmaceutical purification — began to take hold. It was in these years that the shape of the business settled: not resin on its own, but a single undertaking running from the design of the resin-filled plant through to its installation.

Large plants and ultrapure water, and the technical standing they bought

In 1951, to broaden its research beyond process water, the company levelled the fire-ruined site of the Kikufuji Hotel at Hongo in Tokyo and built the Tokyo Research Laboratory there, with Shimizu Hiroshi (清水博) as its first director[8]. That same year it delivered a monobed pure water plant of 600 tonnes a day to Showa Denko’s Okawa works — among the largest in the world at the time[9]. Commissioning brought unexpected faults and rounds of round-the-clock modification, but with the plant in service pure water could be had for $0 (¥30) a tonne against the $1 (¥500) that distilled water had cost, and one man on his rounds replaced the eighteen the old method required[10]. Transforming both the cost of making pure water and the labour it took established the company’s technical standing as an equipment maker.

The move into Tokyo began with sales rather than with the head office. A sales office opened in Chiyoda-ku in January 1949[11], and in January 1951 an alliance with Rohm and Haas of the United States secured the technical base of the resin business[12]. Between 1952 and 1953 the applications widened to extraction and purification plants for glucose, formalin and streptomycin, and the company entered speciality liquid purification as well[13]. Head-office functions moved to Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo in July 1954[14] and again in August 1955 to Bunkyo-ku, where the laboratory stood[15], so that research, sales and headquarters were gathered in Tokyo early on. On the technical side, in 1957, with the cooperation of Nippon Electric Company, Organo completed Japan’s first high-purity water plant for the electronics industry, and went on to supply Toshiba and Asahi Kasei[16]. This was the beginning of ultrapure water production equipment, which spread to electronics and semiconductor makers such as Shin-Etsu Handotai and Tokyo Sanyo, and from 1972 took in reverse osmosis membranes as well[17]. Pure water technology that had begun with power stations and chemical works connected early to the electronics and semiconductor industries, and set the direction the business would take in later decades.

Building out the regional sales network, and promotion to the TSE First Section in 1985

The commercial base was built out in parallel. In September 1959 Nihon Degremont — today Organo Acti — was established in Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo as the starting point of the sales subsidiaries[18], creating the first version of what became the regional network: a manufacturing parent and a separate legal entity handling sales and installation. Ahead of the flotation, in April 1960 the company took a stake in Nihon Suiko, later Organo Kansai[19]; in May 1961 it established Organo Softener, later Organo Tokyo[20]; and that October it listed on the Second Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange[21]. In February 1966 the corporate name was changed to Organo Corporation[22], putting the English name Organo directly into the company name and unifying the external brand. On the production side, the Toda plant opened at Toda in Saitama prefecture in November 1961 to assemble and dispatch equipment of all kinds and to commercialise the manufacture of water treatment chemicals[23], and capital reached $1.1M (¥400m) after nine increases up to that year[24]. Twenty years after its founding, the company had taken the shape it would keep — regionally dispersed, combining sales companies in Tokyo and Kansai with a resin and equipment business run directly from the centre.

From the establishment of Kyushu Organo Shoji — later Organo Kyushu — in April 1972[25], and Hokkaido Organo Shoji — later Organo Hokkaido — in Sapporo that October[26], the regional sales network spread nationwide. In July 1974 the company took a stake in Maruei Kogyo and renamed it Organo Koji, today Organo Plant Service[27], bringing on-site construction and installation in-house alongside the sale of resin and equipment — a vertically integrated structure held within the subsidiaries. From selling resin in its founding years, the business widened into a company offering plant design, on-site construction and after-sales maintenance as a single undertaking, and positioned itself as a comprehensive partner in pure water production facilities.

In March 1985 the company was promoted to the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange[28], reaching the large-company stage thirty-nine years after its founding. In November that year Organo Maintenance Service was established in Bunkyo-ku[29], taking in through a dedicated subsidiary — and on an organised basis — the demand for resin replacement, performance diagnosis and plant refurbishment that arises in the pure water installations of power stations and chemical works, which are built on the assumption of more than ten years in service. The regional network went on expanding: the establishment of Tohoku Organo Shoji and Chubu Organo Shoji in April 2000 covered eastern and central Japan[30], and that same month the Iwaki plant opened at Iwaki in Fukushima prefecture[31] as a second production site alongside the Tsukuba plant, which had opened in November 1989[32]. In this way the skeleton of the business took its final form — resin supply, plant design, on-site construction and maintenance, four functions deployed across the country.