Biography | 稲盛和夫 Kazuo Inamori — The Nishinokyo Address Where Kyoto Ceramic Began

People tell the Kyocera story as if Inamori opened a headquarters in 1959. He opened a borrowed warehouse. On 1 April 1959, Kyoto Ceramic Co., Ltd. was registered at 101 Nishinokyo Haramachi, Nakagyo-ku, Kyoto, with capital of three million yen. The first plant sat northeast of the Nishi-Oji Oike crossing, in a mixed block of houses and small factories that is still readable as an industrial fringe. The money and the shed came through acquaintances of his former Shofu superior, Masatsugu Aoyama, including Kazuo Nishieda and Miyaki Electric. Miyaki Oya, the electric-works president who put up backing, was the first representative director. Inamori entered the register as a director and engineering general manager. He was twenty-seven. The staff numbered twenty-eight. He became president only in May 1966, after the firm had already taken ceramic-substrate work from IBM. The company left this block for Yamashina in 1972 and for the present Fushimi tower in 1998. What stands at Haramachi 101 now is ordinary Nakagyo fabric, not a museum. The founding is the moment; the later glass tower is a different address. This pin uses the published lot number, not a private residence. Photo: later portrait of Inamori, Naotake Murayama, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Taken in Palo Alto, years after the warehouse year.