On March 10, 1918, Kikui Boshoku was established, funded by
Sakichi Toyoda, Kamenosuke Fujino and Ichizo Kodama. The new company was
created less than two months after the establishment of Toyoda Boshoku
Corporation in order to expand the spinning and weaving business during the
wartime production boom.
To rationalize its operations during the cotton industry
slump which occurred during the Great Depression, in 1931 Kikui Boshoku was
absorbed into Toyoda Boshoku and its name changed to Toyoda Boshoku Minami
Plant. In 1942, following the merger between five spinning and weaving
companies, it became Chuo Spinning Company Aichi Plant, and after the merger
with Toyota Motor Corporation in 1943 became the company's Aircraft Aichi Plant.
British imports of cotton products to the Chinese market
were halted due to the outbreak of the First World War, leading many Japanese
spinning and weaving companies to expand into China. On August 1, 1919, Chinese
import tariffs were raised from 3.5 percent of cotton thread prices to 5
percent, a move which pushed many Japanese manufacturers to commence local
production in China. To put the situation in context, 17 Japanese companies
accounted for 33 of the 87 spinning and weaving plants established in China
between 1914 and 1925.
Under these circumstances, in 1920 Sakichi Toyoda began
construction of a spinning and weaving plant in Shanghai. The plant was
completed in May 1921, and opened in November that year as Toyoda Boshoku Sho.
Kiichiro, who graduated university in July 1920, submitted
"Design Specifications of Power Facility for Shanghai Spinning Plant"
for his graduation project, and was already involved in engineering side of his
father Sakichi's business while he was studying.
When Kiichiro started his automotive business, Toyota
Boshoku Sho provided funding support and played a central role in expanding the
company's business in China, and also supported the establishment of Hokushi
Jidosha Kogyo in 1940, and Kachu Toyoda Jidosha Kogyo in 1942. In 1944 the
company adopted the Toyoda Boshoku name, changing from Toyoda Boshoku Sho to
Toyoda Boshoku. After Japan's defeat in the Second World War, the company was
seized by China.
Kiichiro Toyoda
Starts Working for Toyoda Boshoku
Kiichiro Toyoda
Sakichi Toyoda's eldest son, Kiichiro Toyoda, was born on
June 11, 1894, in the village of Yamaguchi (now part of the city of Kosai) in
Shizuoka Prefecture.
Around this time, as Sakichi devoted his time to studying
power loom and went back and forth between Toyohashi and Nagoya, Kiichiro lived
at his grandparents' house in the village of Yoshizu. It was not until he was
about three years old that he began living with his father.
Kiichiro spent his childhood in company housing located on
the premises of the factories of the various companies his father operated,
such as the Buhei-cho and Shimasaki-cho plants of Toyoda Shoten (Toyoda Shokai
Office), or the Toyoda Jido Shokufu Plant (Sako-cho), so he grew up seeing
people designing, creating and fixing machines all around him. Later in life,
Kiichiro alluded to that time when speaking to engineers who were part of
Toyota Motor Co., Ltd.:
I went to the United States with Okabe where we visited
Crompton Corporation and Northrop Corporation, and tried our hands at assembling
and test running looms. Although I had never done that before, I had constantly
been around machines as a young child so I managed to succeed at the task
without any problem at all. Engineers must think of the machines in their care
as close friends and be forever giving them attention1
It would be fair to say that Kiichiro's close contact with
machines as a young child allowed him to confirm for himself how things worked
and ultimately gave rise to the genchi genbutsu (go to the source to find the facts)
thinking that plays such an important role in Toyota's approach to operations
today.
In 1908, Kiichiro graduated from an Aichi Prefecture
prefectural elementary school and entered Meirin Middle School. One of the
school's other students in the same year as Kiichiro was Kaoru Ban2, who later
as a section manager in the Engineering Bureau of the Ministry of Commerce and
Industry would be involved in the formulation of Automobile Manufacturing
Industries Law.
In 1914, Kiichiro entered a high school in Sendai that had a
specialty course in engineering, which is what Kiichiro studied. Many of the
friends Kiichiro made at this school would later help him in his automobile
business.
After graduating from high school in 1917, Kiichiro entered
Tokyo Imperial University (current University of Tokyo) along with several of
his classmates: Takeo Akahira, Seigo Ito, Hideo Kobayashi, Kichizo Tanabe,
Shiro Nukiyama, and Daizo Nukiyama. At university Kiichiro became acquainted
with Kazuo Kumabe and Tokushichi Mishima, who would also play a part in
Kiichiro's future automobile business. These university friends also introduced
Kiichiro to a number of their friends, such as Ryonosuke Yamada, and Masao
Naruse, and it was through this widening circle of friends that Kiichiro was
able to receive the advice of well-known academics such as Dr. Kotaro Honda.
Kiichiro graduated from university in July 1920 and returned
to Nagoya with the intention of helping out Toyoda Boshoku.
Kiichiro wanted to take over the business from his father,
Sakichi, but at the time Kiichiro's brother-in-law, Risaburo (who had married
Kiichiro's younger sister Aiko in 1915) held a senior position at Toyoda
Boshoku. Risaburo had been appointed as a managing director and was charged
with running the company while Sakichi was abroad in Shanghai overseeing the
construction of a new plant there. Having just finished his studies, the timing
wasn't right for Kiichiro to make a play for the company's reins.
Instead, Kiichiro decided to return to university to study
law and social systems with respect to business management, enrolling in the
Faculty of Law in September 1920.2 However, Kiichiro's time at the Faculty of
Law ended much sooner than he had expected, at the end of March 1921. Sakichi
and Toyoda Boshoku's chief engineer Akiji Nishikawa were tied up with the
construction of the spinning mill in Shanghai, which meant that there was no
one in charge of engineering in Nagoya. Kiichiro's recall to Nagoya was in all
likelihood due to the fact that Toyoda Boshoku didn't have an engineer at the
time who was sufficiently versed in spinning technology.
The entry in Kiichiro's diary for Friday, April 8, 1921,
reads: "Leave for Kikui at midday. Take gear to Nakamura plant; will stay
there several days." This entry indicates that within a few days of
returning from university Kiichiro was already fully engaged in the company's
plant operations.
The "Kikui" in Kiichiro's diary entry refers to
the Kikui Boshoku, where at the time an engineer from the U.S. company Whitin
Machine Works was installing a number of new spinning machines. Kiichiro
probably visited the Kikui plant to learn what he could from the engineer.
Kiichiro referred to the Toyoda Boshoku plant in Nakamura,
Aichi-gun, as the Nakamura plant. He would stay overnight there, learning how
to spin thread and weave cloth, as well as studying the workings of automatic
looms.
In 1921, the Toyoda Boshoku plant in Shanghai (Toyoda
Boshoku Sho) was completed, and a ceremony was held at the beginning of May to
mark the occasion. Kiichiro Toyoda's mother, Asako, and his sister Aiko and her
husband Risaburo had left for Shanghai to attend the ceremony, while Kiichiro
remained in Japan to continue learning the ins and outs of the Nagoya plant.
It was in Shanghai that it was decided that Kiichiro and
Risaburo, accompanied by his wife, should visit the United States and Europe on
a study tour.1 Later, Kiichiro would say of this trip, "When I went
overseas a few years back, I wanted to find a good automatic loom, but despite
all my searching and investigations, I came back empty handed," alluding
to the fact that one of the purposes of the trip had been to investigate
automatic looms in England.
On July 29, 1921, Kiichiro, together with his sister and
brother-in-law, set off for the United States from Yokohama, after having been
sent off the day before by four of his close friends from his high school and
university days, including Hideo Kobayashi and Shiro Nukiyama.
They arrived in San Francisco some two weeks later on August
14. Once in the United States, Kiichiro, Aiko and Risaburo spent the rest of
August visiting cotton plantations and related facilities, as well as textile
factories. The group then left for England, arriving in London on October 1.
Research memo for a
cop-changing automatic loom
In England, they again devoted their time and energy to
visiting cotton production facilities and textile factories. Kiichiro organized
to receive training at A. Platt and Company for two weeks from January 15,
1922, so he left his sister and brother-in-law to take up his training at
Oldham, outside Manchester. While at A. Platt and Company and studying the
processes and methods for manufacturing spinning machines, Kiichiro also
studied cop-changing automatic looms.
At the end of February 1922, Kiichiro, Aiko and Risaburo
boarded a Japanese ship in Marseille and returned home after a brief stop in
Shanghai.
The training Kiichiro's received at A. Platt and Company
was, certainly valuable when it came time to establish Toyoda Automatic Loom
Works.
Creating the first
automatic loom prototype
Sakichi Toyoda, as previously explained, established Toyoda
Boshoku Sho in Shanghai and moved to the city in 1921. He directed Kiichiro
Toyoda and other personnel to continue their research and development of
automatic looms and frequently traveled between Shanghai and Japan to oversee
their work.
After returning back from his tour of the United States and
Europe in 1922, Kiichiro promptly began research and development of automatic
looms together with Rizo Suzuki1 and Risaburo Oshima.2
At first, Kiichiro built the same automatic loom that
Sakichi had developed and added a few modifications. By around the summer of
1923, Kiichiro had approximately 30 automatic looms up and running.
For its part, Toyoda Boshoku was constructing a new plant in
Kariya-cho, not far from Nagoya, in order to cope with a future expansion in
business. For the time being, the premises was designated to be used as an
experimental automatic loom plant, and was essentially completed by the end of
December 1923. Ahead of the commencement of trial operations, the company
placed an order for 200 looms with Toyoda Loom Company, which the latter
declined. This situation forced Kiichiro and the rest of his team to outsource
production of parts to external suppliers. The various parts were then
assembled into automatic looms at the Toyoda Boshoku workshop.
The new automatic loom was essentially the same as the
existing regular loom (manufactured by Toyoda Loom Company), but was fitted
with an automatic shuttle changing mechanism (made by the Toyoda Boshoku
workshop). Trial operation was carried out at the Kariya plant from March to
May 1924, and involved 200 looms. Trial operation of 20 looms resulted in two
to three breakdowns a month, but with 200 looms, the number of breakdowns
increased more than 10-fold, an unsustainable level for actual production.
However, this large-scale trial allowed the research and development team to
gain early insights into the failings of the new looms, which ultimately led to
a faster development time.
The mechanical faults were quickly rectified, and in mid-May
1924 work began on a newly redesigned automatic loom prototype that
incorporated an automatic shuttle changing mechanism. By the end of June, the
wooden molds for the metal cast parts had been made, and in July the first
prototype of the new automatic loom was completed. The prototype was then
tested and modifications were made before the final machine was completed.
As mentioned previously, Sakichi had sold his original
patent to Toyoda Loom Company in January 1913 for 80,000 yen. This meant that
designs covered by that patent could not be used, which in turn meant that the
new automatic loom had to incorporate new devices and mechanisms. New patents
were filed for the shuttle-change automatic loom3, a warp let-off motion
device4, and a warp tension adjuster5, under Kiichiro's name, and for a warp
halting device6 under the names of Kiichiro and Akiji Nishikawa, in November
and December 1924. Through the efforts of Kiichiro and those under his
supervision who struggled with Sakichi, numerous automatic loom-related new
devices were invented.
Later, in March 1925, in order to prevent human error,
Kiichiro made a further improvement to the new automatic loom after he invented
a Shuttle Magazine for Automatic Loom.7 This meant that when the shuttle needed
to be reloaded, it couldn't be inserted into the magazine by the operator
unless it was in exactly the right position. By preventing damage to the loom
through human error, this device can be seen as one of the first examples of a
failsafe mechanism.
In a little over 20 years since Sakichi first began his
study into an automatic loom, the fruits of Kiichiro's efforts had made
Sakichi's dream a reality.
Source: TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION
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