Accepting full Hitachi ownership — and the 1948 dissolution of the tie (1948)

What is left after a bond that policy, not choice, untied

From the moment it handed every share to its customer in 1937, this company was inside its client. Eleven years later the bond was untied not by its own will but by a post-war policy — the dissolution of the zaibatsu. A company that had lost Osaki to the air raids and was down to the single Ibaraki plant held, at the moment of independence, nothing beyond the ability to make insulating paper and coatings. Japan’s first vinyl tape, in 1951, looks like the first result of transferring that ability onto petrochemical polymers. An independence imposed from outside seems to have worked as the motive to go looking for products of its own.

Yet cutting the capital tie did not cut the ties of trade and competition. In 1961 Nitto sold the battery and magnetic-tape division it had raised itself to Hitachi, and the former parent became the buyer of its consumer business. As vice-president Hijikata Saburo said in a 1973 lecture, the company was by then in complete competition with Hitachi Chemical in insulating materials — facing, in the same market, the group whose capital it had once taken. Independence meant only that ownership had changed; becoming a company that did not depend on one product and one customer took another decade and more.