Dai Nippon Printing - Company History

The founding of Shueisha and the dawn of letterpress printing

In October 1876 Sakuma Teiichi (佐久間貞一), Ouchi Seiran (大内青巒) and Ko Bukkai (宏仏海) came together as promoters to found Shueisha in Nishikonyacho, Kyobashi ward, Tokyo — near what is now Ginza-Nishi 4-chome[1]. Yasuda Hisanari (保田久成), a relative of Sakuma's, put up ¥1,000 of capital; the founders bought the equipment of the Takahashi letterpress works, then up for sale, and set out with four hand-operated presses installed in a brick-built office[2]. The name is said to have been chosen by Katsu Kaishu, whom Sakuma — a former retainer of the shogunate — had asked to name the firm: it carried the resolve to excel even Britain, the leading nation of the day[3]. Through his work with the Daikyoin, the office that oversaw religious instruction, and with the Buddhist newspaper Meikyo Shinshi (明教新誌), Sakuma had heard from Western missionaries that letterpress was coming to replace woodblock printing, and decided to open a letterpress works himself. Printing government documents and statute books alongside published works, Shueisha secured an early footing as a pioneer of modern typographic printing in the first years of Meiji.

Not long after its founding the firm took on the printing of celebrated early-Meiji works such as Nakamura Masanao's translation Saikoku Risshihen (西国立志編)[4], and on that footing, in November 1886, acquired a site of some 16,000 square metres (about 4,900 tsubo) at Ichigaya-Kagacho in Ushigome ward and opened its First Plant, the Ichigaya works[5]. It began there with a letterpress department and widened its equipment to a type-founding section, an electrotype section and a lithography department; a firm that had not outgrown the backstreet workshop became one of the leading letterpress printers in the country. In April 1888 it was reorganised as a limited-liability company[6], and in January 1894, in step with the entry into force of the Commercial Code, as a joint-stock company[7], with Sakuma Teiichi taking office as its first president[8] — a modern corporate form adopted early. The engineering bent that led it to design its own type, the Shuei typeface (秀英体)[9], laid the ground for the technology-driven company that would later move into electronics.

The Ichigaya First Plant was rebuilt as a modern reinforced-concrete printing works, and when the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1923 devastated the Tokyo printing trade, Shueisha's new plant escaped with only light damage. Orders poured in while competitors stood idle, and this became the making of the company[10]. In October of the same year the head office moved to the new Ichigaya plant[11], fixing the Ichigaya headquarters that has now stood for 150 years. From the earthquake onward, orders for newspapers, magazines and other periodicals concentrated on the firm, and through the late Taisho and early Showa years it assembled relief, planographic and intaglio printing under one roof as a full-line plant working at volume[12] — the production base that would carry both the merger and the diversification to come.

The merger with Nisshin Printing and the birth of Dai Nippon Printing

Nisshin Printing, the partner in the merger, had been established in 1907 and, from a plant at Enokicho in Ushigome, had bought the Ichida Offset Printing works at Tabata in 1927 and the Tsujimoto Photographic Crafts company at Iriarai in 1928, then opened a branch plant at Osaki in 1932, growing into a full-line printer with gravure work of its own[13]. In November 1934 Aoki Hiroshi (青木弘), managing director of Shueisha, and Hirano Tomio (平野登美夫), managing director of Nisshin Printing, signed a contract for a merger of equals[14]; the two companies combined in February 1935 and the trade name was changed to Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd.[15] The new company started with capital of ¥6 million under its first president, Masuda Giichi (増田義一), with Aoki and Hirano side by side as managing directors[16]. It was the largest reorganisation the Japanese printing industry had then seen; the new company was the largest printer in Japan, and the starting point of the DNP brand[17].

Having come through the paper controls that followed the outbreak of war with China and the bombing of its plants, the company restarted the Enokicho works in September 1946 and opened a Kyoto plant in October[18]. In the same year it was designated a controlled plant of the Ministry of Finance and took on the printing of banknotes and securities[19] — the seed of the later securities and card businesses. In May 1949 it listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange[20], putting in place the means to raise capital during the postwar recovery, and with the Osaki plant in November 1951 and the Osaka plant created by the merger with Nihon Seihan (日本精版) in September 1956 it settled into a two-hub structure across Tokyo and Osaka[21]. Holding both the “software” of its typefaces and the “hardware” of plants across the country, it had the supply capacity to meet the fast-growing demand for publishing, textbooks and commercial printing that ran from the recovery years into the high-growth era, and the earnings base that would fund the diversification to come.

Kitajima Orie's rebuild and the origins of expand-printing and diversification

In the disorder after the war, Dai Nippon Printing was shaken by labour disputes, and the rebuild was led by Kitajima Orie (北島織衛), who became president in 1955. Kitajima was the third son of Aoki Hiroshi, then managing director; he had hoped to join the Industrial Bank of Japan, failed to do so, entered Dai Nippon Printing instead and made his name in sales[22]. In June 1951, before taking the presidency, he announced a five-year rebuilding plan to the whole company as managing director and won its full backing in a vote of all employees[23], securing the footing for recovery. Setting out a policy of raising several pillars rather than trusting the safety of one, he used the Osaki plant opened in 1951 as a foothold and moved into paper containers and packaging printing, a field he had marked out on a study trip to the United States[24]. There was opposition inside the company to breaking the emphasis on publishing, but he overrode it, and the business grew into the packaging pillar of later years. Around the idea of expand-printing (拡印刷) — widening what was printed, the materials it was printed on and the processes before and after — and around the notion that a business taking orders should nonetheless sell its own proposals, Kitajima led twenty-four years of aggressive management[25].

One of those pillars was the electronics materials that came from applying the fine pattern transfer at the core of printing to substrates other than paper. In 1957 the company joined the trial production for domestically made colour television, begun under the direction of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, as the maker of the shadow mask, and was looked to as the only printing company with a research laboratory worth the name[26]. It made prototype shadow masks for cathode-ray tubes by etching, and in 1958 became the first Japanese manufacturer to put them into volume production and sale, building a dust-free plant at Kamifukuoka in Saitama prefecture[27]. In 1959 it widened into the photomasks indispensable to making integrated circuits, and in 1967 into chrome masks[28], securing its position as a supplier of semiconductor and display materials. The Central Research Laboratory, completed in July 1966, was the site where this applied research was carried on systematically[29], and the birthplace of the later electronics business.

Diversification did not stop at electronics. Kitajima also saw room to grow demand for the company's own products, paper cups among them, and in 1963 set up Hokkaido Beverage with Dai Nippon Printing holding 60 per cent, stepping into Coca-Cola bottling for Hokkaido[30]. Against the view that soft drinks would not sell in a cold region the business grew, and it is the origin of the beverages segment, today's Hokkaido Coca-Cola Bottling[31]. Production kept expanding through the high-growth years, with the Akabane plant in January 1972 among others[32], and in July 1975 the company established the Production Technology Research Laboratory to study manufacturing technology itself as a system[33]. The two laboratories together formed the technical base for a diversification that reached past the bounds of a printing company into electronics, packaging and functional materials.