Sakichi Toyoda

Japanese mechanical engineer

• Born: February 14, 1867
• Birthplace: Yamaguchi (now Kosai), Shizuoka prefecture, Japan
• Died: October 30, 1930
• Place of death: Nagoya, Aichi prefecture, Japan

From 1890 to 1925, Toyoda’s inventions revolutionized the Japanese loom to become a globally competitive automatic power machine. He helped Japan to catch up with the Western industrial revolution. His success and vision enabled his son to do the same for Japanese cars by founding Toyota.

Primary field: Manufacturing

Primary inventions: Automatic power loom; automatic shuttle-changing device

Early Life

Sakichi Toyoda (sah-kee-chee toh-yoh-dah) was born in rural Japan in 1867, the oldest son of the carpenter Ikichi Toyoda. His native village of Yamaguchi (now Kosai), in Shizuoka Prefecture southeast of Tokyo, was part of Japan’s textile region. Here, primarily women weavers manufactured cotton cloth on labor-intensive hand looms to support the family income from rice farming.

Toyoda’s boyhood was affected by fundamental changes in Japan. After the United States forced Japan to open itself to Western commerce in 1853 and the shogun abdicated and relinquished power to the Meiji emperor in 1868, Japan embarked on a quest to catch up with the West’s industrial revolution. Even in villages, basic schooling became mandatory. Toyoda finished elementary school in 1877. He was then apprenticed to his father.

Unhappy with the traditional life laid out for him, in 1885, at the age of eighteen, Toyoda was electrified when a traveling teacher told of the new Japanese patent law and urged the boys of Yamaguchi to contribute to Japan’s technological development. On that day, Toyoda decided to become an inventor.

Reading the translation of British author Samuel Smiles’s inspirational Self-Help (1859) confirmed Toyoda’s choice. He decided to invent an improved loom to benefit life and work of the women weavers of his community. As a carpenter, Toyoda knew about the physical construction of the hand looms in operation, basically unchanged since medieval days. As he lacked a theoretical scientific background, he observed the looms, then made his modifications to models and conducted experiments. He made his inventions by learning through trial and error, a method he used throughout his life.

Toyoda’s big break occurred when he attended the Third National Industrial Exhibition in Tokyo in 1890 at age twenty-three. For two weeks, Toyoda observed the foreign power looms on display. He then invented his first new wooden manual loom in the fall of 1890 and patented it in early 1891. Toyoda’s invention increased weaver productivity by 50 percent by linking the flying shuttle to the mechanism holding down the yarn just woven.

Life’s Work

Toyoda built four or five of his own looms and set up a small weaving factory in Tokyo in 1891. Pressured by his family, he married his first wife, Tami, and tried to earn enough money from his new looms to finance further inventions. However, he found that foreign competition was too fierce. Efficient French hand looms were cheaper, and Western power looms more productive. By the fall of 1893, Toyoda’s first business built upon his invention failed, and he moved back to Yamaguchi. Soon, he left to work for an uncle in the commercial city of Nagoya. His son, Kiichiro, was born on June 11, but his marriage to Tami failed. Sakichi kept his son after the divorce.

In late 1894, Toyoda invented a yarn-reeling machine, the foot pedal of which freed one arm of its operator, doubling productivity. In 1895, he opened the Ito Retail Store in Nagoya with his uncle and a third partner. He married again, to Asako Hayashi, who proved an astute businesswoman who managed the store together with Toyoda’s younger brother Heikichi.

In 1896, Toyoda’s store nearly crashed as a result of the fraud of the third partner. Marshalling all his strength, Toyoda managed to save the store and invent his narrow wooden power loom, which became operational in 1897, the year his daughter, Aiko, was born. For the first time, a Japanese inventor held a patent to a power loom, a milestone in Japan’s industrialization.

In 1899, Toyoda sought to set up a business that earned enough revenue to allow him to conduct his expensive research. Together with the Japanese trading conglomerate Mitsui, Toyoda founded the Igeta Shokai (trading) company, with himself as chief engineer. Igeta’s business was to produce and sell Toyoda’s power looms under a ten-year license agreement.

At Igeta, Toyoda articulated his later famous principle of kaizen, or continuous improvement, as he strove to better his inventions. Yet his demand for research funds clashed with the company’s goals to save money during an economic downturn. Angrily, in 1902, Toyoda resigned from Igeta, and he returned to his old Ito trading firm he renamed Toyoda Shokai. His wife, Asako, and his second younger brother, Sasuke, managed operation of the company’s 138 power looms.

In 1903, Toyoda invented a new automatic shuttle-changing device for his power looms. However, to his big disappointment, his new steel looms failed in an endurance test against the British competition of Platt Brothers and Company in 1905. Part of his problem was that Japanese metallurgy could not yet yield steel of sufficient quality for Toyoda’s innovative power looms.

To gain more capital, Toyoda teamed up with Mitsui again. He dissolved his own company and founded Toyoda Loom Works in 1906 with himself as operating manager. Soon, Toyoda clashed again with Mitsui over his research budget. Thoroughly disillusioned, Toyoda resigned again and left for the United States on May 8, 1910, intending to immigrate. However, Japanese American chemistJokichi Takamine persuaded Toyoda to return to Japan.

In 1911, Toyoda founded the Toyoda Automatic Weaving Factory. In October, 1912, he sold his rights to future earnings from his inventions for a lump sum to finance his ongoing inventions. In 1914, he founded a spinning business and cooperated with Mitsui again.

In his ultimate quest to invent an internationally competitive Japanese power loom, Toyoda relied on friends and family. In October, 1915, his daughter, Aiko, married Risaburo Kodama, younger brother of Mitsui’s Ichizo Kodama and a managing talent. Toyoda adopted Risaburo as his son, and in 1918 Risaburo Toyoda became managing director of the newly founded Toyoda Boshoku, a spinning and weaving company.

At the same time, Asako Toyoda made sure that Kiichiro Toyoda went to Tokyo University. Kiichiro graduated in mechanical engineering in 1920, part of the new elite of Japanese engineers. After some initial clashes, father and son soon worked as a successful team of inventors. The older Sakichi provided his practical experience, and Kiichiro used his university training to improve on the ideas of his father.

Beginning in 1921, Kiichiro was responsible for giving his father’s inventions their final practical shape. Their teamwork was crowned with the success of the first Japanese fully automated loom, patented in 1925. Kiichiro invented a shuttle-change box based on Sakichi’s original design. This invention led to the 1926 founding of the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works. There, textile production on the new power looms ran simultaneously with industrial field testing of new inventions.

Recognizing Sakichi Toyoda’s achievements as one of Japan’s ten most influential inventors of his time, Japanese emperor Hirohito bestowed the Imperial Order of Merit on Toyoda in 1927. Toyoda suffered a mild cerebral hemorrhage later that year.

Turning to what he saw as the next big field for Japanese inventions, Sakichi exhorted Kiichiro to turn to automobile manufacture. To provide his son with the necessary start-up funds, Toyoda sold the worldwide patents of his automatic power loom to the Platt Brothers of Great Britain for 1 million, or $150,000. Kiichiro closed the deal on December 24, 1929. This proved sufficient seed money for what would become the Toyota Motor Company in 1937, even though Platt only paid $58,000 at closing and later tried to get out of its commitment. Sakichi Toyoda contracted pneumonia in October, 1930, and died in Nagoya later that month at age sixty-three.

Impact

Toyoda was one of the great Japanese inventors who ensured that their country caught up with the Western industrial revolution. Inspired by the spirit of the Meiji Restoration that provided unheard-of opportunities to an inquisitive, intelligent, and restless young man like himself, Toyoda magnificently rose to the occasion. Once he decided to become an inventor, he turned to the field he knew best. He ceaselessly worked to invent ever more efficient Japanese looms, making his country independent of foreign looms. His inventions provided Japan with the means of manufacturing domestic textiles to replace imports and allowed the country to become an exporter of well-spun cotton products.

As an inventor, Toyoda continuously struggled to make his ideas economically viable and successful in a mass industrial setting. Teaming up with financial partners, he always ran into difficulties when resources became scarce. His reliance on his family network laid the foundation for the survival of his companies into future generations. His first wife gave him his son, Kiichiro, who, aided by Sakichi’s second wife’s insistence on his academic training, would found Toyota Motor Company, slightly changing the family name for a more auspicious Japanese spelling. Through his daughter, Aiko, Toyoda gained an adopted son invaluable for his management capabilities.

Just as Sakichi Toyoda invented Japanese looms that eventually surpassed their Western models in quality and price, so his son’s Toyota cars would do the same. Toyoda embodied the ideal of the Meiji era Japanese inventor: Through total commitment to his task, seen as a duty to both nation and community, he lifted Japan into the industrial age. With his visionary decision to shift the focus of his son’s inventions from looms to cars, Toyoda ensured that after the dark days of World War II, Toyota cars would gain a world market. His kaizen philosophy of continuous invention and process improvement became the business philosophy of Toyota. The company’s outstanding success would be widely studied and praised by U.S. corporations and economists.

Bibliography

Landers, David S. “Toyoda: Toyota and the Rise of Automobiles in Japan.” In Dynasties: Fortunes and Misfortunes of the World’s Great Family Businesses. New York: Viking Press, 2006. Chapter-length study of the success of the global auto company built on the basis provided by Sakichi Toyoda. Looks at Toyoda’s inventions, his philosophy, and his final instructions to Kiichiro. Illustrated, notes.

Liker, Jeffrey K. The Toyota Way: Fourteen Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004. Chapter 2 of this book, written for a business audience, admiringly looks at the philosophical approach behind Toyoda’s inventions, his inspiration by an English author, and his legacy. Highlights Toyoda’s practical, trial-and-error approach to invention.

Mass, William, and Andrew Robertson. “From Textiles to Automobiles: Mechanical and Organizational Innovation in the Toyoda Enterprises, 1895-1933.” Business and Economic History 25, no. 2 (Winter, 1996): 1-37. Excellent in-depth study of Toyoda’s inventions and obstacles he faced. Close look at socioeconomic context and impact of Toyoda’s inventions, his collaboration with Kiichiro, and his legacy. Tables and bibliography.

Togo, Yukiyasu. Against All Odds: The Story of the Toyota Motor Corporation and the Family That Created It. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. First three chapters give a detailed, accurate account of Sakichi Toyoda’s life and legacy as inventor. Highlights Sakichi’s vision and cooperation with his son.