Successive tech alliances with GE, RCA and WE — reversing the domestic-technology creed (1953)

Substance over creed: standing as an equal in technology

The heart of this decision was not a response to financial crisis but the fact that a later generation put its hand to the founding ideal itself. The self-reliance Odaira Namihei raised as a banner was the origin that let Hitachi stand as an independent technology company belonging to neither a zaibatsu nor a foreign parent. That origin was let go, in the face of the reality of falling behind Toshiba, by working engineers of the power division such as Komai Kenichiro, in order to fight on equal terms. When the ideal to be protected collided with the reality needed to win, Hitachi can be seen to have chosen the substance of standing as a technological equal over the signboard of its creed.

That said, the question of whether to rely on the outside or hold to self-reliance was not settled by a single alliance. The essence of this reversal shows in how Hitachi took the imported technology into its own designs and grew it until it held a corner of the world market. Afterwards, too, Hitachi kept re-asking what to own for itself and what to take from outside — the exit from semiconductors, the large overseas acquisitions, the swap of its businesses toward digital and energy. The three alliances of the 1950s can be read again as the starting point of that long question.