Company history

In May 1918 Ichikawa Kinzaburo, a seventeen-year-old lightbulb craftsman, and his elder brother Ginzaburo, twenty, rented a house in Osaka and began making vacuum flask liners. Incandescent bulbs were the original vacuum industry, and the skill of drawing a vacuum inside glass transferred directly. They began as the captive supplier of one wholesaler — Kinzaburo made the liners, Ginzaburo delivered them by bicycle — in a trade split three ways between liner makers, metal-case makers and the wholesalers who assembled and exported them; some 90% of output went abroad.

Being captive meant terms set by someone else, so Ginzaburo broke the exclusivity, sold to several wholesalers, and in 1923 built an assembly plant of his own — becoming, within five years of founding, the wholesaler rather than its supplier. That required a trademark, and he chose one no rival in the trade had used: the elephant, strong but gentle, long-lived, protective of its family. For export he also registered ELEPHANT & CROWN. Sales ran through Chinese merchants in Osaka and Kobe to Tianjin, Dalian, Shanghai, Canton, the Philippines and Indonesia, and Ginzaburo took the Shanghai steamer himself every other year to open accounts.

Then the trade collapsed. Japanese flask exports peaked at 410,000 dozen in 1937 and halved the year after the war with China began; copper and iron were restricted in 1940, production stopped in 1942, and Ginzaburo closed the firm that June under the wartime enterprise consolidation ordinance. He did not switch trades. He rented a two-ken shopfront and opened a flask repair shop, mending flasks with the liners he still held — a thin thread back to manufacturing, kept alive on the rent from thirty houses he had bought in 1939. The business restarted in 1947, incorporated as Kyowa Seisakusho in December 1948, and produced a first postwar hit in the Pot Pelican tabletop flask. Ginzaburo, who had refused the loss-making export prices of the postwar price war, died in July 1952 at fifty-five.

Ichikawa Shigeyuki took over in 1952 and ran the company for thirty-five years. He gave up on exports, where the only weapon was price, and turned the business toward Japan: by 1954 domestic sales were 60% of the total, reversing the prewar shape. Tokyo, the largest market, was foreign ground — Gloria and Tiger held it, and some wholesalers confused the company with an unrelated hardware brand — so the single 22-year-old posted there in 1955 got in the door by offering to repair liners, which broke easily and which nobody wanted to service. That after-sales opening turned into trust, and trust into department-store shelves.

Two investments defined the era. The first was broadcasting: a company with ¥3 million of capital spent over ¥2 million in 1958 to sponsor the sumo digest alone, and its Zojirushi Song Title Match ran 120 episodes to 1966 with ratings peaking at 37%. The second was the liner itself. As long as liners were mouth-blown, prices could not fall; but automating them would destroy the many small glassworkers the industry rested on, and nobody would move first. Shigeyuki bought a full German automatic line in 1960 for $100,000 — ¥36 million — paid entirely from cash. It went badly: the first domestically automated flask in 1963 ran at a 70% defect rate, and he said it was like taping a hundred-yen coin to every unit sold. He still showed the machines to a competitor who asked, on the ground that automation was a problem for the whole local industry, not one company. Borosilicate glass in 1965 finally made it work.

The company took the trademark as its name — Zojirushi Mahobin — in November 1961. The Hi-Pot Z of 1963, which poured by tilting alone, lifted sales from ¥1 billion in 1960 to ¥3.7 billion in 1963 and put the company first in its industry; a 1965 consumer-magazine comparison rated it the only flask with top marks for heat retention. Distribution was rebuilt around regional offices and, from 1967, the Zojirushi Circle organising 5,000 to 7,500 retailers. By its fiftieth anniversary in 1968 it had ¥9 billion of sales and 600 employees — and a development office opened in 1966, because a company living on one product knew it.

Glass rice containers broke easily, held heat poorly and tainted the rice. The development office decided to solve the problem with electricity instead of vacuum, and in December 1969 approved changing the vessel from glass to metal — knowing that metal would invite the electrical manufacturers in. Shigeyuki later said this was the decision that troubled him most in his career. The electronic rice jar launched in May 1970 at ¥10,000, nearly twice the price of a glass one; by autumn distributors were driving trucks to the factory for stock. Sales went from about ¥14.3 billion in 1970 to ¥31 billion in 1972, and the product opened a new channel in electrical shops. The air pot (1973) and the electric rice cooker-jar (1974) followed, the latter developed with heating plates supplied by a Hitachi affiliate because Zojirushi knew heat retention but not cooking.

In February 1973 newspapers reported a fire caused by one of its rice jars. Shigeyuki halted production and replaced the power cords of every unit made between June 1970 and March 1971, appealing nationally on television and in print; rumours circulated that the company would file for reorganisation, but it had the cash to absorb the loss. The response reshaped it — quality months from 1973, a quality-control department, a technical centre with a product testing laboratory, and in April 1973 the separation of sales into a distinct company.

The next threat came from outside the glass trade: a rival launched an all-stainless flask in 1978, breaking the assumption that liners were made of glass. Told to make a better one if it was going to be second, Zojirushi dropped its supplier tie-up and developed its own, using a getter that works at 450°C to silver-plate a metal liner as if it were glass, and launched Tuff Boy in 1981. It hired the Italian designer Mario Bellini for a new air pot, accepting a condition that the design could not be altered; the resulting Mini-Deca (1984) entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1987. But the core rice-cooker business was under assault from Matsushita and Sharp, and an assembler’s thin margins could not survive a price war: the year to November 1987 brought a ¥1.67 billion ordinary loss. The answer was to leave the price fight — a 15% cost-reduction drive cutting ¥2.5 billion over two years, and a deliberate move upmarket that by 1989 gave Zojirushi roughly 35% of domestic rice-cooker shipments and first place.

Manufacturing moved abroad while the premium products stayed home: a Thai plant in 1986, an American sales company in 1987, a Hong Kong plant in 1995, sales companies in Taiwan (2002) and Shanghai (2003). At home the market had gone from first purchase to replacement, and cheap Chinese imports were arriving. Production was transferred to a subsidiary in 2003, with 239 departures and ¥1.7 billion of special retirement costs, and a further voluntary redundancy round followed in 2010.

Then came a boom the company did not make. Chinese tourists buying in bulk — the so-called bakugai — lifted sales past ¥80 billion and operating profit above ¥10 billion for about two years in 2015–2016, against a normal run-rate nearer ¥60 billion of sales and ¥2–3 billion of profit. President Ichikawa Norio has since called those figures an aberration that cannot be used as a reference for normal times. When the buying stopped, the task was to land the peak back on the company’s real strength while rebuilding margins from something other than tourists.

The centenary answer was price per unit. In 2018 Zojirushi launched Enbudaki, a top-of-the-range rice cooker switching multiple heaters across its base for higher heat, with the critical parts made in-house at the Osaka plant, and opened a directly run restaurant in Osaka serving nothing more remarkable than cooked rice. It moved to the TSE First Section in 2018 and the Prime Market in 2022. Capital policy turned as well: a takeover defence adopted in 2022 was discontinued in December 2024 in favour of buybacks and a higher dividend, after a Chinese appliance family’s fund became the largest shareholder and a Hong Kong fund proposed abolition — though the Ichikawa family remains the core shareholder. Cooking appliances are now about 70% of sales, half of procurement is overseas, and every yen of depreciation costs ¥50–100 million of operating profit. Sales reached ¥91.1 billion in the year to November 2025, with operating profit up 24.9% to ¥7.4 billion, and the current plan aims at ¥100 billion of sales by 2028 with distribution spread into Korea, Europe and Southeast Asia.