The three-company merger toward a land-sea-air heavy-industry group (1968)

Binding them together — and the question it left

The heart of the three-company merger lay less in sheer expansion of scale than in restoring, after twenty years, the integrated whole of the founding business that the postwar split and reorganization had severed — bringing it back under a single management. The ideal Kojiro Matsukata had drawn in the Meiji era — a comprehensive heavy-industry house spanning land, sea and air — had for a time been dispersed as shipbuilding, rolling stock, aircraft and steel were parcelled out into separate companies. The merger that Hitoshi Sano led raised that ideal as the centripetal force of management, while also being a pragmatic choice that answered the demands of the age — internationalization and the ever-larger scale of ships. When the inheritance of an ideal and adaptation to the competitive environment pointed the same way, the decision to rebind capital and management, beyond the loose coordination of the five-company circle, became real.

And yet the comprehensiveness of holding land, sea and air within one company left Kawasaki Heavy Industries a question of no small weight in the years that followed. Swings in the shipbuilding market and the differing profitability of each business pressed on the company both the strength and the burden of being comprehensive, and Kawasaki would go on to rearrange how it grouped its businesses again and again — hiving off the ship division, spinning out the motorcycle and rolling-stock businesses. The frame of the comprehensive heavy-industry group that the 1969 merger bound together became the starting point of a business portfolio that would run for the next half-century; at the same time, it became the prototype for a question — hold the whole together, or narrow to a specialty — that each new generation would be made to ask again. The meaning of the decision that made three companies one is measured not only at the moment of binding, but across the long process of continually re-weaving the bundle thereafter.