Biography | 豊田喜一郎 Kiichiro Toyoda — Born in This Village Because His Mother Came Home to Deliver

Toyota's founder was born in a village his parents had already left. By 1894 Sakichi Toyoda and his first wife, Sahara Tami, were living in Tokyo, in what was then Senzoku-chō in Asakusa, where Sakichi was chasing loom patents and very little else. Tami travelled back to the Toyoda family house at Yamaguchi, in Yoshizu village, Shizuoka, to give birth. The practice has a name in Japanese: 里帰り出産, returning to one's own family for a delivery. Kiichiro was born there on 11 June 1894. His mother left roughly three months later, worn down by a husband who put invention ahead of a household that had no money in it. The infant stayed. His grandparents raised him in the village until he was three, when he was brought to Nagoya to live near his father's workshops. That detail explains more than the usual founder story does. He grew up inside the plants — Takehira-chō, then Shimazaki-chō, then a house on the grounds of the weaving works at Sakō — and years later told Toyota's engineers that setting up looms in an American mill had come easily to him because machinery had simply been there since he was small. The village is Kosai City now, and the site is the Toyoda Sakichi Memorial Hall. Worth setting expectations before you go. The hall opened on 30 October 1988 for the 120th anniversary of Sakichi's birth, and the thatched house at its centre is a 1990 reconstruction of a late-Edo building rather than the fabric Kiichiro was born in. The larger two-storey house on the site is later still. Sakichi built it in 1907, at forty, for his parents; it is normally closed, as is the sukiya-style annexe added around 1916. What is honestly here is the ground, the hillside behind it, and the distance from anywhere. Eighty kilometres of it, in a straight line between this farmhouse and the Nagoya workshops, and a man who would later stake a loom company on building cars began as a child his father was too preoccupied to come and collect. Admission is free. The site lies west of Lake Hamana, in Kosai's Yamaguchi district. Photo: Yanajin33, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.