Leaving the paper-hanging trade for wallpaper wholesaling (1970)

What concentration left behind

At the centre of this switch was not a skill the family owned but a judgement about how to read a market. The craft of mounting scrolls and sliding doors could not be carried directly into Westernizing interiors. Even so, standing on the trade flows and the ties to craftsmen it had built handling fusuma and hanging scrolls, the company bet early on wallpaper — a product that was not yet a market. That a bearer of a traditional craft let go of its own best skill and moved to distributing a new material is where the boldness of this decision shows.

The price of that concentration was a constitution long dependent on a single market: domestic interiors. The strength of getting ahead of an emerging wallpaper market is the same thing, seen from the other side, as the structural problem of leaning on Japan. Half a century later, a company pressed into overseas M&A and a turn toward space creation reflects both the fruit and the burden of that concentration in 1953. Choosing to step first into an immature market prepared both the long success that followed and the need for the next transformation.