Separating Nagoya Rubber as a second company (1949)

A shape set by statute, and what it later made possible

The 1949 separation was less a strategy drawn on a blank sheet than a procedure carried out within the frame the Enterprise Reconstruction and Reorganization Act provided. The rubber division, placed with another company under the wartime enterprise consolidation order, could presumably have been returned to Toyota Motor itself after the war; what was actually done was to stand it up as an independent joint-stock company. Seen alongside Nippondenso and Minsei Boseki separating in the same period, one can read a way of thinking on the Toyota side that entrusted parts and materials to the independent accounts of separate legal entities.

The effect did not show up at once. For a company starting with ¥8 million of capital, holding a 48-ounce injection moulding machine of its own was a heavy decision even with financial help from its customer. Even so, a rubber company owning resin equipment became the foundation for widening its range from steering wheels to instrument panels and on to airbags. Inside the keiretsu, yet with its own legal personality and its own investment judgement — the shape handed to it in 1949 for administrative convenience is what left a company able to decide for itself how wide its materials would be.